E-drug: National Medical/Pharmaceutical Waste Disposal
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear e-druggers
Even with good medicines supply system management, a certain
(hopefully low) level of pharmaceutical waste is inevitable through
expiry of overstocks of useful medicines and of other obsolete and
unwanted medicines.
In a situation such as that which has prevailed for many years in
Uganda where medicines supply management has been far from ideal,
such wastes may accumulate to a significant extent.
This may cause associated medicines management problems such as
the illicit return of expired medicines into the market, blocking of
required storage space by bulky expired stocks and problems in
ensuring acceptable means of safe disposal of such items.
Having recently secured funding support from one of our major health
development partners, we are actively looking into the establishment of
a national facility for the proper and efficient collection, storage and
disposal of expired medicines and other medical waste products.
It is expected that the facility could also undertake the incineration and
disposal of other types of waste (eg, certain industrial or even civic
wastes) on a commercial basis thus sustaining the continued
operations of the facility.
In connection with this we would greatly appreciate information on the
following:
a) contact information for reputable suppliers of suitable medium size
incinerators with a scrubber facility
b) national health/medical waste disposal policies (although a very
useful WHO document is available on this topic, we would also like to
receive individual country information and experiences, especially - but
not exclusively- from Africa)
c) the operation and management of such facilities
Chris Forshaw
Danida Pharmaceutical Adviser
Uganda Health Sector Programme Support
Ministry of Health
c/o Royal Danish Embassy
PO Box 11243, Kampala, Uganda
Tel: (+256) 77 76 01 76 (mobile)
Tel/fax: (+256) 41 34 37 50 (residence)
chris.uhssp@utlonline.co.ug
--
To send a message to E-Drug, write to: e-drug@usa.healthnet.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe, write to: majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
in the body of the message type: subscribe e-drug OR unsubscribe e-drug
To contact a person, send a message to: e-drug-help@usa.healthnet.org
Information and archives: http://www.essentialdrugs.org/edrug