To understand Palm Beach bio-medical waste disposal, we first need to understand where are medical wastes coming from. There are several sources of medical waste and these include sharps (needles, scalpels, and other medical instruments used for lacerating or piercing the patient’s skin), blood, blood products and other body fluids (urine, semen, vomit…) laboratory waste (cultures and stocks of pathogenic agent), human body parts and other pathological waste and more.
These wastes, evidently, pose a serious not only individual health risk, for medical personnel, patients and bio-medical waste disposal workers, but also for a risk for the community and the environment if they are not treated and removed properly.
Regulating Palm Beach Bio-Medical Waste Disposal
The knowledge that medical wastes can be hazardous is nothing people have learned yesterday. Many states already had some rules and guidelines about how to discard infectious waste, but this wasn’t enough and there was almost no control of who is implementing these regulations and who does not.
Hospitals were all too happy to dump used needles in municipal landfills or dump contaminated waste in overfilled dumpsters behind their buildings. Many had no problems with flushing liquids, such as blood and other bodily fluids into the sewer.
A series of incidents changed that for good. In the 1980s, more and more used needles and other sharps, as well as other types of medical waste began washing up on the eastern shore of the United States. Seeing the environmental hazard and the risk of these ending up on public beaches, the federal government decided in 1988 to pass the Medical Waste Tracking Act (MWTA) and appointed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to oversee it. This was the first real bio-medical waste disposal law.
MWTA was only implemented in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico and lasted until 1991. However, many states today use it as a “backbone” for their own medical waste management laws today.
Pollution
Pollution is another common problem regarding medical wastes and it is more and more evident today. Medical incinerators are still the most commonly way to dispose of medical waste, but today it is common knowledge that these machines are pollutants. They especially release mercury and dioxin into the air or water. When it reaches water sources, mercury, for example, can put larger animals at risk. Because of this, most states are pushing towards alternative bio-medical waste disposal methods, such as autoclaving (steam sterilization), microwaving, chemical disinfection and others methods.
Wrap Up
We have gone a long way in Palm Beach bio-medical waste disposal and its regulation from just 20 years ago. Since the Medical Waste Tracking Act from 1988 to 1991, US states have been striving to improve the way they deal with infectious waste all the time. Of course, this is still a major problem, but seeing the positive efforts is always welcome.