CHATTOGRAM, June 20: Clinical garbage is fast polluting the port city for apparently no management of such trash from several hundred hospitals and clinics here.
The places around the infirmaries are littered with such waste having an overpowering stench, thus posing a serious public health hazard.
The city has no less than 300 hospices, including state-run Chattogram Medical College Hospital (CMCH), Chattogram General Hospital and Railway Hospital, to deliver medicare to its residents.
There are private healthcare centres like Maa O Shishu Hospital, Chattogram Diabetic Hospital and Bangabandhu Memorial Hospital of USTC, Max Hospital, Surges-cope, Metropolitan Hospital, National Hospital Pvt Ltd.
What is more, Chattogram City Corporation (CCC) maintains and operates several health establishments.
It is alleged that most of the sanatoriums dump garbage like used syringe, ampoule, pad, strip and band elsewhere. As such, the local environment is being grossly polluted.
Sources said street boys and girls collect syringes and other used materials from nearby hospitals and clinics and sold the stuff to a syndicate at low prices.
The used items are then supplied to drugstores and medicine shops for resale to unwary patients who ultimately become the key sufferers.
CMCH officials said staff members are being trained to put clinical garbage into dustbins.
"Yet, some garbage is thrown here and there for negligence on part of our staffers. CMCH is taking care of this matter seriously."
Chattogram civil surgeon Dr Azizur Rahman said, "The use of clinical garbage like syringe for second time is dangerous. We have to remain alert to this end."
Prof Sikandar Khan, president of the Chattogram chapter of Bangladesh Environment Movement, said, "Untreated clinical garbage is vitiating our environment."
"The authorities concerned must stay alert while giving a no-objection certificate to private clinics on the very issue of common concern," he told the FE.
A CCC official said, "We've no equipment to neutralise dangerous chemical waste. The health care centres here produce 20 tonnes of clinical garbage daily."
"We used to dump the garbage. But, we have no Insinuator machine to damage the clinical and chemical garbage," he said on condition of anonymity.
Bangladesh Medical Association central vice-president Dr Sheikh Shafiul Azam said, "Private clinics and hospitals are not sincere in waste management."
Government directives stipulate that private infirmaries must have their own plants to treat clinical waste.
But the authorities have signally failed to do so.
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