Treatment facility needed for Baguio hospital wastes

The Health Care Without Harm-Southeast Asia (HCWH-SEA) has asked the Baguio City government to speed up the purchase of a “more efficient” treatment technology for the city’s infectious hospital wastes.

HCWH-SEA executive director Merci Ferrer said in a statement that Baguio must soon have a centralized treatment facility for such wastes.

She said her group agreed with Baguio officials and the administrators of seven tertiary hospitals there last September that a centralized treatment facility is the “immediate and long-term solution” to the city’s hospital waste problem.

Since July last year, chemically treated wastes from Baguio hospitals had not been collected by the city government due to the lack of a treatment facility for chemical and hazardous wastes at the Metro Clark waste management facility.

This forced the hospitals to handle the final disposal of their own treated wastes. The seven hospitals churn out 9,708 kilograms of infectious wastes in a month.

The HCWH-SEA is recommending the use of an autoclave, a pressurized device used to heat solutions above the boiling point normal atmospheric pressure to achieve sterilization.

The group is part of a global coalition of 473 organizations in more than 50 countries working to protect health by reducing pollution in the health care sector.