Oil Spills and Medical Waste
Despite all of the technological advances in the world, our societies’ systems continue to be tragically flawed. Consider the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oil companies have developed the once unimaginable capacity to drill several kilometers down in the ocean’s dark depths. Yet next to this wondrous high-tech achievement replete with undersea robots and remote, computerized onshore command centers, no one developed technology for stopping a deepwater blowout and cleaning up the environmental and economic catastrophe it has caused.
The same disequilibrium can be found in health care. High-tech hospitals are being built throughout the developing world. But often, just behind these marvels of modern healing you can find their waste water lines dumping raw sewage across the road, and mountains of health care waste being burned in a polluting incinerator or open pit.
Vaccination campaigns, supported with the best of intentions and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid often do not contemplate how to manage the waste they create, thereby setting up a series of new health problems as sharps go up in smoke or are buried out the back.
The situation has reached crisis proportions in countries like South Africa, where, as this newsletter reports, there are growing calls for a Commission of Enquiry to investigate the country’s deepening medical waste crisis.
Fortunately, the solutions do not require rocket science nor deep sea robots, but rather simple clear steps that hospitals and health ministries can take, as examples in this newsletter show. Ultimately, as HCWH Founder Gary Cohen writes, “we need to help the health care sector clean up its own house,” and more broadly we need to transform the disequilibrium between technology, health and the environment, “at a scale that matches the social and ecological crises that we face.”
Enjoy the newsletter!
Josh Karliner
International Team Coordinator
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