KARACHI, Dec 20: Hepatitis-C is spreading rapidly among a large number of young garbage pickers, as they pick used syringes and other clinical waste from different hospitals of the city for recycling.

Poor enforcement of the Hospitals’ Waste Management Rules (HWMR), 2006, is responsible for this sorry state of affairs, which aids the spread of diseases amongst wider sections of the population.

Former director-general of the Environmental Protection Agency and current Additional Secretary Health Dr Iqbal Saeed Khan, said that the majority of the over 1,000 hospitals in the city are not properly disposing of their infectious clinical waste. He added that vulnerable children and youth, who pick recyclable items from the waste, get cuts and bruises, which transmit viruses and bacteria into them.

“A random study of different hospitals suggests that over 50,000 garbage collectors, mainly young Afghani children, are suspected to be hepatitis-positive,” he said.

Dr Khan regretted that even those hospitals that have incinerators were not segregating infectious and non-infectious waste before incinerating it.

EPA Director Kiran Noman, said that the EPA was short of staff to monitor and enforce the HWMR, 2006, adding that there was a ban on recruitment. “But now we have got 10 monitoring inspectors that would inspect and ensure enforcement of the HWMR, 2006, in Karachi,” she said.

Special Secretary Public Health, Sindh, Dr Captain Abdul Majid, said that the health department has some information about an organised business involving medical waste going on behind the Sobhraj Maternity Hospital, Saddar, but no one has been caught yet.

He added that most of the big public hospitals in Karachi have incinerators but the smaller hospitals and dispensaries are yet to get incinerators.

“The Sindh government had proposed to the federal government three months ago to legislate for the use of auto-destructive syringes, so that the issue of reuse of disposable syringes could be settled,” he said.

He held quacks responsible for the situation. According to him, they are the final beneficiaries of the recyclable clinical waste trade. The secretary public health regretted that he could not go “too far” as far as accountability of the quacks was concerned.

“We can only lodge an FIR against someone according to the PMDC rules, which are not too effective. These quacks restart their business after some days,” Dr Captain Abdul Majid said while quoting the example of a hepatitis epidemic in Qambar district of Sindh due to the abundance of quacks there.—PPI