Farmers and vets are at considerable risk of sharps injury during vaccinations and other injections, and various stock management procedures including ear tagging etc.
Fighting to give an injection to a struggling child may be nothing to the risks of injection a feisty testosterone0-fuelled bull, or a family Rottweiler with more teeth than sense.
So it is right to issue a warning.
Livestock farmers should be aware of the growing problem of serious injuries caused by the incorrect use of hypodermic needles.
This is the message from the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, which says improving needle safety when injecting animals is important to minimise the risks of accidental self-injury.
Professor Colin Robertson of the University of Edinburgh says needlestick injuries can lead to amputation of affected fingers, bacterial infections and local allergic reactions.
He said the most common reasons for these injuries were accidental self-injection through handling restless animals and/or unsafe needle practices.
- Use sharps bins which have needle remover notches to avoid manual removal of needles
- Replace sharps bins promptly; the maximum fill line should never be exceeded
- Consider using automatic re-sheathing safety devices
- Do not use your teeth to remove needle shields
- Do not, where ever possible, resheath needles
Simple, and very clear instructions that should benefit all of those who care to read and learn.
But this does raise a recurring question. What happens to all of the veterinary clinical wastes? Shared needles are the norm in farm animal husbandry, though not so in small animal practice. Nationally, do waste tonnages add up? Has anyone bothered to check?
Few waste management companies have comprehensive contracts with vets, though many are small scale high street producers and may elect for uplift of their waste output vial local authority services. However, there is still an obligation to waste segregation, of sharps and pharmaceutical wastes, of some tissue wastes, and of wastes from the initial, pre-diagnosis, of a number of infectious diseases including rabies and FMD though these latter fractions will be infrequent.
Down on the farm, infection risks do not justify single-use disposables as the stock is likely to be on the table within no time at all. However, the control of infectious diseases is of prime economic importance, and new infections continue to arise, of which Schmallenberg virus is the latest one. Without adequate care, infections may be transmitted throughout and between herds, and following sharps injury to the operator also.