| By :
Mark Etinger
The value of medical waste services can generally be measured in what we do not see. We do not see children playing in playgrounds littered with the debris of successful medical procedures. We do not see blotches of blood and other nasty waste in our drinking water. We do not see our streets littered with a variety of regulated medical waste that might surely speed up the spread of diseases and ailments that quite frankly need no help spreading from one person to the other. Medical waste removal is a dirty scary business and lucky for us, most of us will likely never have to come in anything more than tangential contact with it. Filthy medical waste disposal is not an easy task and doing it seamlessly has taken elaborate development of infrastructure managed by a wide variety of companies and regulatory agencies charged with keeping our environment free of used supplies that might contaminate our world in ways that we would never imagine except in our scariest nightmares and most tense disaster movies. The opportunities for an illness to spread are already wide ranging without having contaminated syringes floating in our sewage system. Simply touching handles on public transportation that have been utilized by infected people can spread an illness to you and through out your work place and social circles within a short period of time. The likelihood of disease outbreaks in places where there is little or no control over medical waste management becomes incredibly high. I spend a lot of time concerning myself with things like medical waste mismanagement. It seems like such a potentially fertile method for our collective demise to come about. The smallest in budget cuts could cause the wrong blood soaked piece of gauze from a treated infection to end up in the wrong place and expose an entire school or office building to a disease. Soon afterward there would be an extension of that outbreak and by the time anyone noticed we could have a population diminishing quicker than you can cry about it. It is a scary world out there and diseases are not the easiest thing to put a lid on once they have started spreading. I am not trying to be an alarmist here, though I probably am. It is simply clear to me that the hidden heroes behind medical waste disposal are keeping us, our neighbors, our friends, coworkers and our families safe from a miserable future. They deserve credit for that even if they are too busy to receive it.
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