DOH pushes COVID-19 waste management at local level

ALL THAT TRASH Dressed in personal protective equipment, a janitor at the storage area of Tala Hospital in Caloocan segregates trash bags, many of which contain infectious waste. The hospital said it piles up 1,600 kilos of garbage a day, compared with 2,700 daily last year. Tala has also tapped the services of a “treatment, storage and disposal” provider to collect the garbage, which the hospital sprays with disinfectant. An autoclave donated on Friday is sure to help in disposal, but it won’t be operated until a structure is built as a designated area for the machine, the hospital said. —LYN RILLON

More than two years into the pandemic, the Department of Health (DOH) is training its sights on the management of hazardous COVID-19 waste—focusing its efforts at the local level, among hospitals and communities around the country.

The pandemic “exacerbated our problem on health-care waste [as it] increased the demand and use of varying health-care products,” DOH officer in charge Maria Rosario Vergeire said on Friday.

This generated “tens of thousands of extra medical waste” which threaten public health, she added.

Vergeire made these remarks at a ceremony in Caloocan City where the Philippine office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) donated an autoclave to the DOH-run Dr. Jose N. Rodriguez Memorial Hospital—also known as Tala Hospital after the community there in Barangay 188, District III.

Autoclaves are pressure containers which sterilize, at high temperature, single-use medical implements such as syringes, vials and smaller items of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves and goggles.

From masks to helmets

But there are other kinds of COVID-19 waste, as the World Health Organization (WHO) noted in a report early this year on pandemic waste management. These range from face masks and swabs to medical safety boxes as well as helmets and laboratory coats, which are also part of PPE.

Gerardo Mogol, an engineer of UNDP assigned to its waste management program, explained that autoclaves have a capacity of 200 kilograms and can operate eight to 10 hours a day.

He said the temperature for sterilizing the single-use materials could be set to as high as 93 degrees Celsius (equivalent to 200 degrees Fahrenheit).

After that procedure, those items go through “shredding,” then they’re disposed, he said.

Edwine Carrié, deputy resident representative of UNDP-Philippines, said his office has also donated an autoclave to the Pasig City General Hospital.

‘Number one problem’

Besides providing equipment to hospitals and technical support and training to health-care professionals, UNDP-Philippines aims to help improve the country’s response to medical waste management, Carrié said.

According to the WHO, one in three health-care facilities in the country does not have a safe disposal system.

Fritz Bonite, pollution control officer of Tala Hospital, said that was its “number one problem,” especially at the height of COVID-19 in 2020.

“There were times when our … storage could not accommodate them (the hazardous materials) anymore, so these were just left outside,” he said.

‘What we’ll be doing’

Also around that time, the Pasig City General Hospital had a daily average of 300 to 500 kilos of garbage, according to Josie Flores, officer in charge of environmental group EcoWaste Coalition.

Early this year, Environment Undersecretary Jonas Leones said the country had about 1,000 metric tons of health-care waste—equivalent to around 166 trucks—being collected each day.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) appealed at that time to the local governments to do their part in managing the collected garbage, after it was reported in January that seven children in Legazpi City, who were playing with used syringes and tubes from a trash bag found on the city shores, became infected with COVID-19.

The DENR had noted then the “increasing amount of improperly discarded household health-care wastes,” apart from those disposed by hospitals.

Vergeire said on Friday that the DOH is keen on “capacitating local government units (LGU), especially the LGU facilities at the lower level of care.”

“They don’t have proper training or guidance on how they can properly manage their health-care waste, so that is what we’ll be doing … in the years to come,” she said.

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—KATHLEEN DE VILLA