I was reading a recent news item about a hospital which burned down in India. It was a startling story not just because it was scary to think of a medical facility, which can be so necessary for the local people in an area, burning down. It was extra troubling to consider all of the regulated medical waste which should have been managed in a very specific way now sitting molten under piles of rubble that would be cleaned by a wide array of trained and untrained workers.

I thought about how dangerous all of that medical waste had suddenly become. No longer labeled appropriately many of those contaminated pieces of material would spread to the other debris leaving a smoking pile of danger in it’s wake. It is a scary thing to consider what might occur should medical waste disposal become inextricably linked to a disaster of this magnitude.

It makes you wonder if there are plans in place for handling this sort of event should it fall upon our own medical facilities. One begins to assume that medical waste management companies have already gone through these disaster scenarios in their planning. In my case I sit around and hope to heck that is the case.