Hospital waste; as dangerous as diseases

Hospital-based infections, or nosocomic infections, are as bad as any disease one contracts outside the hospital and they should be taken as seriously.

According to hospital hygiene and sanitation technician, Wilfred Mbanwei, of the Batibo District Hospital in Momo Division, North West Region, it is quite easy to pick an infection from clinical waste generated in hospitals.

"That is why hospital waste should be treated with a lot of care and disposed of with equal speed and caution," Mbanwei told The Green Vision. The management of waste generated by hospitals requires a certain attitude and professionalism to be adopted to handle the problem.

Hospital waste is classified as follows; biological, sharps and kitchen waste.

Waste resulting from medical activity include human tissue, blood and bodily fluids, excretions, drugs and other pharmaceutical products, swabs, dressings, syringes, needles or other sharp instruments.

Mbanwei said a hospital usually has three pits and an incinerator for the different types of waste; pit for bio-degradable food remains, a placenta pit for human waste from the theatre and wards, and a pit for sharps – needles, suturing needles, scalpel blades and bottles.

According to Mbanwei, hospital waste should be fenced to keep humans and animals away from it. But poor conduct and inappropriate disposal methods of hospital waste remain a health hazard concern in most public as well as private health facilities.

In Cameroon most hospitals still use inefficient and environmentally unfriendly incinerators to burn dirt.

The Batibo District Hospital has an incinerator built in 2012 with funds from the African Meningitis Vaccination Programme.

"It is not very efficient but it helps to reduce infection," Mbanwei said. At the Bamenda General Hospital, the hygiene and sanitation department takes the trouble to separate the hospital's waste.

"We are negotiating with the City Council to provide a container to collect domestic waste from the hospital while the hospital handles waste generated in the wards and theatre," said Tangwa Ernest Njolai, health technician at the Bamenda General Hospital.

He said they always clean the hospital with disinfectants and fumigants to keep the area sanitary.

The hospital has three incinerators to supplement the management of clinical waste.

"Government has released some funds to solve the problem of clinical waste in all the ten Regions," said Nchanji Timothy, a health engineer, "we now have a third and more modern incinerator."

While some hospitals take the trouble to strictly manage their waste, treatment of waste at the Buea Regional Hospital Annex in the South West is far from laudable.

An old-fashioned incinerator which went into disrepair four years ago stands behind the hospital wards. Strewn around it are heaps of clinical wastes.

"A modern incinerator which was bought for the treatment of waste went bad and the hospital did not repair it but instead resorted to using the traditional incinerator," one hygiene technician told The Green Vision.

According to international standards, the chimney of a hospital incinerator must rise above seven metres from the main building in order to reduce the environmental pollution and avoid breathing problems among the population.

The Buea Regional Hospital's incinerator instead has a pit where waste is thrown and the toxic smoke that ensues during burning affects breathing, given that the incinerator's chimney is barely a metre high.

An incinerator engineer told The Green Vision that hospital waste ought to be treated before it is burnt, but from what he has noticed at the Buea Hospital, all sorts of rubbish are dumped into the incinerator and burnt and this is not healthy.

They are, however, currently constructing a modern incinerator at the hospital.

According to the engineer, the incinerator is very effective and can burn anything to ashes including human parts and has less effect on the environment.

"This modern incinerator is a donation from government to public hospitals; a privilege private hospitals don't have and I wonder how they burn their dirt," the engineer said.

He also said government had donated the modern incinerator more than eight months ago, but the hospital authorities did not bother to install it and left it lying outside while they continued using the traditional incinerator.

"It was when I wrote a proposal to the authorities that they asked me to come and install the machine, if not the machine would have still been idling in the hospital's premises," he said.

He said Yaounde and Bamenda have already benefitted from the modern incinerators and Buea is the third.