KARACHI: The scale of government apathy towards what health experts described as a ‘volatile source of infection’ could be gauged from the heaps of unattended medical waste lying in and outside one of city’s largest public sector hospitals.

A visit to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital (ASH) on Wednesday showed that there were three garbage dumps, one of them located within the boundary wall of the hospital’s trauma centre, where all kinds of medical wastes were being thrown away.

Two garbage dumps, located a few yards from the hospital, were being used by nearby laboratories to discard their refuse. Information gathered from the ASH revealed that the staff was using hospital premises for dumping medical waste for a long time.

No administrative official of the hospital was immediately available for comments.

“Now, who would impose Section 144 here and remove this hazardous waste endangering public health? Do we need a celebrity to force the government to do its job,” said Dr Qaiser Sajjad of the Pakistan Medical Association.

A PMA representative says all institutions need to work together for the sake of people

He was referring to Shaniera Akram’s recent tweets on the state of Clifton beach, parts of which were littered with medical waste. The issue was highlighted by the media and woke up the authorities, albeit for a while.

Criticising further, Dr Sajjad said all institutions needed to work together for public good.

“We know that the ASH is under the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation and the matter should be sorted out by its administration. But, it’s the provincial government’s responsibility to intervene when it’s seeing that an institution is unable to do its job because of any obstacle, funding or otherwise,” he said.

‘Volatile source of infection’

Explaining how unattended waste across the city is affecting public health, Dr Sajjad said it had now become so common that patients admitted to hospitals for surgery were falling ill due to some infection, increasing the risk of complications.

“Every concerned citizen is troubled by swarms of flies and mosquitoes, which have invaded the city. But, this problem gets more serious in case of healthcare facilities, which are supposed to be very clean,” he said, adding that the government needed to look into the medical waste issue on a priority basis.

Speaking about the impact of unattended medical waste, Dr Altaf Ahmed, representing the Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Society of Pakistan, explained that the dangerous thing about biological waste containing disease-causing germs and toxic chemicals was that it spread with anything which came in contact with it, including wind, rain, birds, insects, garbage collectors and even tyres.

“So you can imagine the scale of the disaster it causes as it affects hundreds and thousands of people. Medical waste is a volatile source of infection and needs to be picked up by professionals.

“Given the poor civic conditions we are living in, it’s not surprising that we see outbreaks of different diseases every now and then and antibiotic resistance is on the rise. Hospitals have become very unsafe because they don’t have infection control practices in place.”

Asked about what needs to be done, he said the government should teach and train hospital staff on infection control practices, apart from setting up safe mechanisms in place for disposing clinical waste and legislating on the subject.

“The old technology of burning/incinerating waste has been replaced by shredders that significantly reduce waste size. The refuse is then disinfected and dumped at landfill sites,” he said, this procedure was environmentally safe as it did not involve discharge of hazardous fumes.

No official of the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency was available for comments. The department is responsible to ensure implementation of hospital waste management rules in the province.

Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2019