The Shanghai Drug Administration has pledged to tighten the supervision on disposable medical instruments, such as syringe and blood transfusion equipments in the city, besides announcing plans to build more incineration plants to dispose of medical wastes.
The announcements are in line with efforts to create a "secure environment" for public health, officials said at the commemoration of the second anniversary of the "Provisions on Medical Instruments Administration" on Saturday.
Officials said medical institutions and related facilities would be told to keep a close eye on disposable medical devices. Hospitals and clinics will be required to keep detailed records on purchasing, stocking, usage and waste disposal of all their medical appliances.
"The measures are necessary to help prevent illegal activities," especially by those unscrupulous business people, who collect scrap for recycling, said He Huaiqing, director of the circulation department under the drug administration.
The city generates 360-plus tons of used disposable medical devices in a year from as many as 490 hospitals in the city. Most of them are dumped in an incineration plant in Minhang District after being disinfected in hospitals, the drug administration authorities claimed.
But they also admitted that a "relatively small portion" of them are recycled because some unscrupulous businesses on the outskirts of the city and in neighboring provinces collected them as scraps for recycling.
Experts say even though most of them are disinfected, they may still carry virus or infectious germs, posing risks to people's health.
Last year, the state health authorities uncovered 3,000 firms trading in counterfeit disposable products.
While such activities are not rampant in Shanghai, officials said some hospitals in the city - which they didn't name - still sold disposable items as scrap.
"A few such cases have been uncovered in Shanghai," said Gu Zhenghua, spokesman for the Shanghai Health Supervision Institute. But he declined to provide details, other than to say, "As far as I know, some people from other provinces bought waste products for recycling them in their hometowns."
The administration also vowed to launch more spot-checks than the 1,000-odd checks they carried out last year and add more incineration plants for treatment of waste medical devices from hospitals.
(eastday.com April 22, 2002)
