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The Pakistan Environment Protection Agency (Pak-EPA) has written letters to hospital administrations in Islamabad to appear for personal hearing to apprise the environmental body of measures they have put in place for disposing of their waste, an official said.
“In the first phase, we have called hospitals for personal hearing in the EPA and if they fail to come with concrete and satisfactory answers, legal suits will be filed against them in the Environment Protection Tribunal,” EPA Director Laboratories Ziauddin Khattak told The Express Tribune.
He said most hospitals, clinics and labs in the federal capital are playing with the lives of people by disposing of their medical waste improperly, which is causing spread of fatal infectious diseases such as hepatitis. Khattak added that children and elderly people are prone to these infectious diseases because of their weak immunity systems.
“The Pak-EPA monitoring team visited almost 28 public and private hospitals and clinics in the federal capital and except for two, all of them have zero facilities for disposing of their infectious and non-infectious waste,” Khattak said. He said that some hospitals were even found throwing their hazardous waste into municipal garbage, particularly in the Bhara Kahu area.
The official said that civic bodies should also establish integrated infectious waste incinerators in the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) to overcome the issue.
The hospital waste, if not handled properly, not only poses a serious threat to human health but also to the environment, he said.
There is a serious inadequacy in handling industrial and medical waste in the country but the improper disposal of medical waste in Islamabad is increasingly becoming a potential public health risk and an environmental burden.
Data on waste generation by hospitals in the city is also inadequate or missing, making it difficult to put in place an efficient solid waste system.
“The EPA is struggling against inadequacy in hazardous waste management and consistently asks hospitals to take every possible measure to rectify the situation,” Khattak claimed.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 18th, 2015.
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@Careful reader: Arre It is not pakistan specific Other south asian countries too have this problem Unless the hospital has the thinking and drive to implement standards based way of at-source-segregation and disposal of waste and are empowered with some budget and incentives for compliance, it is difficult to succeed it.
This is just another of 1000 manifestations of the failure of the state to govern and failure of pakistani citizens to have personal ethics and morals regarding hurting each other. Such a nation can never prosper.