Saturday, 14 November 2015

Essential Facts To Be Considered Regarding Pharmaceutical Disposal

By Mattie Knight


Pharmaceutical products are an important part of disease management.These drugs all have an expiry date beyond which they become toxic rather than therapeutic. Pharmaceutical disposal refers to the process involved in getting rid of drugs that are no longer needed or are expired. To ensure proper disposal by consumers and health institutions, guidelines have made available to all authorities that need them. Most medicines in California can be discarded together with the household trash but only if the label says so.

Disposal guidelines come in handy for donations since they are highly prone to wastage. This is because the packages may come written in a language that cannot be understood by the recipients. The package may also be delivered when it is almost expired thus limiting utilization. On the other hand, packages with long shelf life may be misused by opportunistic recipients. Also, the destination facility may not have capacity to effectively store the supplies.

To avoid wasting donations, a few simple guidelines need to be observed. This includes donating only those drugs that have durability of more than one year from the time of shipment unless the recipient health institutions have the capacity to effectively accommodate the drugs. Donors should also confirm that medication being shipped is actually appropriate for those meant to receive it.

Any method can be used for disposal on condition that keeps the environment safe from pollution. Improvisation can be done in countries that are not able to afford more advanced methods such as incineration which is commonly used in industrialized regions. Very high temperatures of above one thousand two hundred degrees Celsius are necessary for effective incineration.

To ensure safety, all individuals taking part in the disposal procedure must wear gloves, masks, boots, overalls and other protective wear as deemed necessary. Masks are particularly appropriate when crushing tablets to avoid powder splashing into the eyes. Sorting should be done to identify drugs which are still in good to be used again and those that need discarding. Disposable ones are sorted out further according to what method is to be used for disposal.

Land filling, an affordable way of waste disposal involves piling up waste at a given site without bothering about treatment. Unfortunately drug dealers may take advantage of this and excavate already buried drugs for resale into the market. Tight security therefore needs to be put in place to avoid such setbacks.

Another form of discarding drugs is immobilization. This can be done through either encapsulation or another process that entails rendering the drugs inert. In encapsulation, drugs are packaged into a container which is then filled up by cement or any other appropriate solid materials. The containers should be inspected for explosives prior to filling them with waste.

Flushing drugs down the toilet is a simple technique of disposing of medicines. This, however, may only be restricted to particular forms such as intravenous fluids and syrups. It is not recommended to discard non biodegradable drugs in sewers as this may cause contamination of the entire treatment process. It is also not advisable to release antineoplastics into water systems as this may kill aquatic animals.




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