Illegal medical waste dumping in Swakop

USED medical equipment, mostly catheters and intravenous drips, were illegally dumped near a residential area in Swakopmund on Tuesday.

A concerned resident contacted The Namibian about the waste he had found next to a dirt road in an open space between the suburbs of Mondesa and Tamariskia on Tuesday evening.’I had just come from work and saw the stuff lying along the road. There is a lot of rubbish here, but this looked different. I realised upon closer inspection that it was items from a hospital that someone threw away here,’ he said.No labels were attached to the items to identify their origin, except a red plastic refuse bag into which medical waste is legally supposed to be disposed. These bags are supposed to remain on hospital and clinic premises before being incinerated.Photos of the waste were shown to staff at the Tamariskia Clinic.’No, this is not ours. We throw ours away and send it to the State Hospital to be burned,’ a nurse said.A red refuse bag, similar to the one found on the scene, was seen in the clinic.Swakopmund’s general manager of health, Clive Lawrence, and senior health official, Berdine Potgieter, were at the scene yesterday morning, and a call for immediate removal of the items was made to the municipality’s works department. Fears are that children and dogs would scratch around among the waste.’This is illegal, but to find out who it was will cost some investigation,’ said Lawrence. ‘It is suspected that it must have come from a hospital and not a clinic because catheters and drips will not really be used at clinics.’Suspicions that the waste could have come from a frail-care centre for the elderly were not ruled out either.Potgieter said she would communicate the incident to all hospital administrators and frail-care managers to find out who had dumped the medical waste and why. A case of illegal dumping could follow. She hoped to give feedback by today.