RAWALPINDI, Jan 27: None of the 13 public hospitals and about 500 private clinics operating in the city have any proper waste disposal system, posing threats to the health of citizens, a recent study has said.

Besides, the private hospitals, clinics and nursing homes have no legal obligations to regularly submit reports to any authority about their waste production and management as none of them has been registered with the district health office, the study added.

The research was conducted by a teacher of the Punjab University's institute of chemical engineering and technology quality management division. The theme of the study was "Achieving quality in hospital waste disposal system; the case of Rawalpindi and Lahore".

It said Rawalpindi produced 2,350 kg hospital waste daily, of which 10 to 25 per cent were infectious and hazardous. The study, however, showed that no proper arrangements were made during the disposal of waste from dustbins to the hospital main disposal area/bins and from there to the municipal waste station.

The waste was collected by sweepers and dumped at the back of hospitals, where scavengers collected whatever could be sold in the market. But neither the sweepers/janitors nor the scavengers wore gloves ad washed their hands with soap or any disinfected liquid after handling the waste. Besides, the administration of all the hospitals did not possess any manual regarding waste disposal handling while the job description of the cleaning staff was not properly defined.

It said most of the patients and their attendants ate in the wards and threw the leftovers into baskets which mixed up with the hazardous and infectious waste already present in the boxes.

The study disclosed that despite launching various projects, public and private hospitals had failed to get rid of hazardous waste. It maintained that the infectious and hazardous waste often spread diseases among people, and proposed that hazardous waste, sharps, needles and ordinary waste should be separated from each other during the waste generating point. The hazardous waste should either be incinerated or buried within the hospitalcompound. Needles should be broken in such a way that it could not be reused.

The study classified waste into infectious, hazardous, and non-infectious and non-hazardous. The infectious waste contained any of a great variety of pathogenic micro-organism and could enter human body through a puncture or cut in the skin, mucous membranes, inhalation and ingestion. Hazardous waste caused fatal diseases like AIDS and hepatitis B and C.

The hazardous and infectious waste included all types of medical waste, those produced by operation rooms, sharps and other metallic, plastic bags and bottles used for blood transfusion and urine bags and radioactive material and chemotherapy waste, the study observed.

It added the scavengers and waste collecting staff of hospitals were the most vulnerable to the two dangerous kinds of waste which were also responsible for transmitting various diseases to others.

The study also proposed that all wastebaskets in hospitals should be colour-coded for separate disposal of different waste and all concerned should be made aware of the colours. Besides, areas should be marked even within the hospitals, preferably in different colours, indicating infectious and hazardous areas. Similarly, the study proposed that the waste disposal points should be properly guarded and fenced in order to keep away scavengers.