Contest Winner Inventions Could Save Lives in Developing World

By Stacy Malkan

Sometimes a solution creates problems of its own. When Bill and Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation, through the World Health Organization, spent billions of dollars on immunization programs worldwide to stop the spread of preventable disease, a new challenge was created: what to do with all those plastic needles.

The billions of syringes used each year for vaccination or therapy can’t be reused without risking the spread of Hepatitis B and HIV. But the proposed solution, burning the waste, poses yet another major health risk. Waste incinerators emit dangerous air pollutants such as dioxin, one of the most potent carcinogens and an endocrine-disrupting chemical that already contaminates the breast milk of mothers around the world.

“Does the price of immunizing children have to be the pollution of mother’s milk? We want the answer to be no,” says Charlotte Brody, RN, executive director of the international coalition Health Care Without Harm, which works to transform the health care industry so it is no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment.

So Health Care Without Harm, led by engineer Dr. Jorge Emmanuel, sponsored an international competition in search of non-burn waste treatment technologies that could be easily replicated in developing countries. The group offered cash prizes and put out a call for ideas to universities, engineers and developers around the world. 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.

From the initial 58 preliminary design ideas, the judges selected 30 contestants from 18 countries to submit complete descriptions of their concepts. Judges then chose three winners and five honorable mentions for designs that best met technical criteria developed in consultation with the World Health Organization.

“These innovative designs can be built using local materials and operated with little or no electricity, and they do not require highly skilled labor,” says Dr. Jorge Emmanuel, a medical waste consultant who chaired the panel of international judges.

The results were announced on April 7, as the international community observed World Health Day 2003 and the theme of “Healthy Environments for Children.”

First place, and $5,000, went to the Team of Rys Hardwick-Jones of the University of Sydney, Australia, for a portable solar-powered autoclave system that can be used in any weather conditions. The second place design was a boiling chamber with a mechanical grinder and compactor, while the third place concept involved lime treatment and encasement of the waste.

“These low-cost, easily replicable, non-burn treatment technologies are safer for public health, workers and the environment,” says Gary Cohen, co-director of Health Care Without Harm.

“The technologies provide a solution to a problem faced by many poor rural communities, which are burning medical waste and polluting the air with dioxin, mercury and other toxins because they lack access to affordable alternative technologies that are available in industrialized countries.”

It’s a win-win kind of solution. “The contest was meant to truly solve a health problem instead of moving the problem around,” Brody says.

“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 all medical waste,” she says.

“Even more, I loved 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 problem, the better off we’ll all be.”

The winning designs can be downloaded for free at www.medwastecontest.org