NACA boss decries handling of medical waste

Wale Emosu, Taiwo Akinlembola and Sade Oguntola - 27.11.2007

DIRECTOR General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Professor Babatunde Osotimehin, has expressed displeasure on how blood and blood-products as well as medical wastes like syringes are handled in the country.

Professor Osotimehin said this constituted a big way by which many people got infected with diseases such as HIV and hepatitis in the country.

Prof. Osotimehin said this at the inaugural seminar of Dideolu Specialist Hospital, Ikenne Remo, Ogun State, on Monday in a lecture entitled “Update on Screening for Blood-Borne Viruses in Healthcare professionals in Nigeria.”

He declared that health care settings remains an environment where people were at increased risk of contacting materials from which they could pick infections such as HIV and hepatitis.

“As I go round Nigeria, I see the way people handle blood and blood-products as well as medical wastes and I am not satisfied. The way they handle used needles and other waste and dispose them anyhow as well as reuse needles for injections is bad,” he said.

Though there is a decline in the prevalence of HIV in the country, Prof. Osotimehin said a situation where less than 10 per cent of pregnant women came for antenatal care, thus reducing women that could have had access to facilities for prevention of HIV from mother to child, might continue to contribute to increasing number of children with the virus.

The NACA boss assured that the current efforts to achieve universal access to HIV-related services in Nigeria were in top gear as the agency is increasing such centres that offer services from 250 to 400 by next month.

Describing health workers as highly at risk of getting infected with HIV and other blood-borne infections, he said the country however lacked information on the number of people infected already just as the policy on post-exposure treatment to ensure they are properly taken care of were weak.

Earlier, Dr. Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosumu, in her welcome address at the occasion said health care professionals had the duty to be in their best health in order not to complicate the case of the patients that come to the hospital.

Getting tested for such infections as HIV, she said would ensure they put themselves in a situation that would place them in a situation that would not pose any danger to the patient while they too remained healthy.