Adilabad: ‘Segregate before you throw waste’, ‘Waste can be hazardous’ and ‘Handle with care’ are the slogans popularised by various organisations with regard to bio-medical wastage management. This helps in curtailing environment pollution and spread of diseases among people due to bio-medical waste.

However, no system is in place for bio-medical waste management either at the government or private hospitals leading to spread of diseases among the residents of colonies near dump yards. Some bio-medical waste takes years to get decomposed and mix with the soil.

Despite this trouble to the people, Pollution Control Board officials remain mere spectators even when the norms are violated by the hospitals. Significantly, no action has been initiated against any government or private hospital so far in Adilabad district.

The bio-waste includes needles, syringes, saline bottles, plasters, plastic strips of tablets, discarded medicines and parts of human bodies, foetus which are dumped without any discrimination and collected by the municipal sanitary workers.

Instead, the hospitals should call for systematic lifting of bio-medical waste and burning of the same at secluded places. Surprisingly, even the public too do not have knowledge of the ill-effects and health hazards due to bio-medical waste.

There are nine government hospitals, including community and area hospitals at Nirmal, Mancherial, Bhainsa, Utnoor, Bellampalli, Khanapur and Asifabad, Sipur( T) towns, in addition to the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences( RIMS), Adilabad, and more than 500 private nursing homes, clinics and hospitals in Adilabad district.

The nursing staff and other paramedical staff play a vital role in the segregation of bio-waste that accummulates in private and government hospitals.

Recently, an awareness programme on bio-waste management was held at RIMS and executive engineer, regional Pollution Control Board, Nizamabad, K. Ravi Kumar said there was no bio-waste management or system in place to implement at the government and private hospitals, nursing homes in Adilabad district. No private or government hospitals in Adilabad district practise bio-medical waste management in the district, he said, adding that the indiscriminate dumping leads to pollution to the environment

He said they would issue notices to all the government and private hospitals and nursing homes and ask them to form societies to manage bio-medical waste at their hospitals. The staff at the hospitals should segregate waste and then hand it over to the agencies collecting bio-medical waste.

‘Medicare’ Services, a bio-waste management organisation, manager Stephen Antony said, ‘creating awareness among the nursing and medical staff about bio-medical waste management is important as they directly deal with the waste. He stressed on segregation of biomedical waste into categories before burring it.