Wednesday, 14 May 2003
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Today I fly first to Paris and then on to Geneva. I'm not great at long airplane rides and the jetlag can get to me. But I know how lucky I am to have a job where I can complain about things like going to Geneva.
I'm going to Geneva for the World Health Assembly and the meetings leading up to it. The WHA is the governing body of the World Health Organization, or WHO. Health Care Without Harm, in consultation with WHO, just sponsored a contest to come up with innovative, environmentally sound health care waste disposal technologies that would work in rural areas around the globe. Next Wednesday, we'll honor the contest's winners at a reception cosponsored by the International Council of Nurses and the World Federation of Public Health Associations.
The contest is meant to truly solve a health problem instead of moving the problem around. In brief:
Bill and Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation decide to give a whole lot of money to stop the spread of preventable diseases through immunization. This is a very good thing.
So, the Gates Foundation funds buy billions of syringes. Once they are used for vaccination, they have to be kept from being reused, because the reuse of syringes is a major contributor to the spread of hepatitis B and HIV. How do you stop a good thing such as immunization from creating a bad thing such as the spread of two very deadly diseases?
The proposed solution was the burning of the immunization waste. But incineration of waste creates dioxin and other dangerous byproducts. Dioxin, one of the most potent carcinogens and an endocrine-disrupting chemical, already contaminates the breast milk of mothers around the world. So does the price of immunizing children have to be the pollution of mother's milk?
We wanted the answer to be, "No." So Health Care Without Harm, led by engineer Jorge Emmanuel, came up with the idea for a contest: "MedWaste Treatment -- Minimizing Harm, Maximizing Health: An International Competition for Innovative Technologies for the Treatment of Medical Waste in Rural Areas." The designs needed to be built using local materials and they must be able to be operated with little or no electricity and without highly skilled labor. Applicants had to agree to transfer their intellectual property rights to Health Care Without Harm so the designs would be held in the public domain.
The contest winners pose with their winning autoclave.
I thought the submissions were amazing. A solar-powered autoclave designed by a group of Australian engineering students won first place. Second place was awarded to a designer in the United Kingdom for a system that combines mechanical grinding with boiling water to treat medical waste. Third place was awarded to a team in Mississippi for a proposal to treat waste through the heat generated by a chemical reaction involving lime and subsequent hardening of the waste into a cement-like material. You can read more about the contest, the winners, and the winning designs on the contest website.
I loved the idea of the contest and the image of engineering students all over the world thinking creatively about non-burn alternatives for the treatment of medical waste. Even more, I love being part of an effort to find solutions instead of arguing about whether immunizing children is more important than preventing HIV. Or is preventing HIV more important than stopping the contamination of breast milk? Obviously, they're all important and they all need to be addressed, and the more time and energy we put into figuring out solutions rather than arguing about the problems, the better off we'll all be. Right?
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