HEALTH-SERBIA: Medical Waste Arises as New Threat

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 30 2003 (IPS) - About a quarter of a million tonnes of medical waste poses new health risks in Serbia, health experts say.

After years of silence, the experts have begun to say that Serbia has no strategy for medical and pharmaceutical waste disposal.

"It is our assessment that more than 250,000 tonnes of hazardous waste accumulated in Serbia in the 90s" Miroslav Tanaskovic, head of the Belgrade Health Protection Institute said at a recent seminar on the problem.

"A large part of it is medical and pharmaceutical waste that can have dangerous consequences for people due to the improper storage," he added.

The experts said this was the first time since the early 90s that the problem of hazardous waste in Serbia had been brought up, and called their meeting a step in the right direction.

Medical waste is a normal product of health institutions and their work, and 85 percent is believed to be non-toxic. Experts are worried about the rest, which could be infectious patient tissue, or even radioactive waste from treating cancer patients.

Non-toxic waste is usually destroyed through classical methods like incineration, but infectious and radioactive materials are being dumped into garbage disposal areas, the health experts warned.

"Our statistics say that the medical institutions in Serbia produced 9,630 tonnes of waste last year," Tanaskovic told the meeting. "But that is not a major problem. The bigger problem is pharmaceutical waste."

Tanaskovic and other experts said at the meeting that pharmaceutical waste comes mostly from production of medicines, but also from drugs past their use by date.

"We are not able to calculate the amount of such waste due to the enormous amount of humanitarian aid that flowed into the country, and also due to uncontrolled import of medicines," Tanaskovic said.

The medical experts said there is not a single medical centre in Serbia without at least a truckload of drugs in stock not appropriate for human use.

"Medicines are helpful in their lifetime," Dragan Veselinovic, professor of chemistry at Belgrade University said. "After that, they become highly toxic."

Thousands of tonnes of medicines were brought into Serbia in the 90s because it faced United Nations sanctions, and its pharmaceutical industry was almost dead.

Medical institutions had to rely on drugs that had only a short shelf life ahead. As their dates expired, they were stored in the cellars of the hospitals or in empty warehouses. Large amounts were dumped in ordinary garbage sites.

Thousands of tonnes of these medicines were imported from China. These medicines did not carry World Health Organisation certificates, and most medical institutions in Serbia refused to use them.

Some of this stock was burned down in thermal plants and at a steel mill near Belgrade. But most of it remains in improper storage in and around the medical institutions.

Experts agree that the only solution is for Serbia to take the dangerous substances to countries with proper facilities for their disposal. The cost for such transfer and disposal is between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars a tonne.

"This is a poor country and it will be not easy to obtain funds," Tanaskovic said. "But anything is better than to leave the hazardous material where it is, or to dump it into the rivers."