Management of Medical Wastes: Public Awareness and Associated Health Risks

A study was carried out in 49 institutions involved in the provision of health care services in Morogoro Municipality, Tanzania. The aim was to assess the common practices with respect to the management of medical waste. Awareness of workers in the institutions on the public and environmental health risks associated with improper management of medical waste was also assessed. The results showed that the most common types of wastes include sharps, waste blood and fluids, and anatomical and pathological wastes. About 91.8% of the facilities separated medical wastes depending on their types although 77.6% of the facilities did not treat the wastes before disposal. The commonest method for disposal of solid wastes was land filling (57.1%) while for liquid wastes; most facilities drained them into the municipal sewage system (85.7%). Large proportions of interviewed workers were aware of the environmental (59.2%) and public (69.4%) health risks caused by improper management of medical wastes although some of them violated the regulations related to waste management. It can be concluded from this study that although the generation of medical wastes is increasing, there is still lack of health education on proper methods for waste management among workers in health care institutions. This calls for the need of awareness programmes and enforcement of legislation on proper medical waste management in order to prevent hazards and risks to the public and environment.Keywords: medical wastes, environment, public healt

A bivariate extension of the Hosking and Wallis goodness-of-fit measure for regional distributions

This study presents a bivariate extension of the goodness-of-fit measure for regional frequency distributions developed by Hosking and Wallis [1993] for use with the method of L-moments. Utilising the approximate joint normal distribution of the regional L-skewness and L-kurtosis, a graphical representation of the confidence region on the L-moment diagram can be constructed as an ellipsoid. Candidate distributions can then be accepted where the corresponding theoretical relationship between the L-skewness and L-kurtosis intersects the confidence region, and the chosen distribution would be the one that minimises the Mahalanobis distance measure. Based on a set of Monte Carlo simulations it is demonstrated that the new bivariate measure generally selects the true population distribution more frequently than the original method. Results are presented to show that the new measure remains robust when applied to regions where the level of inter-site correlation is at a level found in real world regions. Finally the method is applied to two different case studies involving annual maximum peak flow data from Italian and British catchments to identify suitable regional frequency distributions

FRIEND Projets H-5-5 et 1.1 Troisième rapport : 1994-1997 = FRIEND Projects H-5-5 and 1.1 Third report: 1994-1997

A selection of the FRIEND activities during the period 1994-1997 is presented in this third general four-year report for that UNESCO IHP project. The river hydrological regimes are mainly dealt, together with their main topics, and tackled through regional approaches: data bases, runoffs,low flows, floods heavy rains, physical basis of runoff, trends, hydrology of the water management. Some information are given on the FRIEND implementation, its groups and its history. An attempt of prospective is suggested for the future of the project, for regional hydrology, and for its place in hydrology in general. The international aspects of hydrology, including the network way of research as undertaken in FRIEND, are also presented. Their advantages, together with the conditions for success, are discussed. The report aims at hydrologists, water resources managers, and scientists or environmental managers who deal sometimes with rivers. / Ce rapport présente une sélection des travaux menés dans FRIEND pendant la période 1994-1997. C'est le troisième rapport quadriennal pour ce projet du PHI de l'UNESCO. Il traite des principaux thèmes concernant les régimes hydrologiques des rivières, abordés selon des méthodes régionales : bases de données, apports étiages, crues, fortes pluies, processus physiques d'écoulements, tendances, hydrologie de la gestion intégrée des eaux. Quelques informations sont données sur l'implantation de FRIEND, ses groupes et son histoire. Un essai de prospective est fait pour l'avenir du projet, mais aussi pour celui de l'hydrologie régionale et pour sa place dans l'ensemble de l'hydrologie ; les aspects internationaux de l'hydrologie, y compris le fonctionnement en réseau de la recherche menée dans FRIEND, sont également présentés. Leurs avantages, ainsi que leurs conditions de succès, sont discutés. Ce rapport s'adresse aux hydrologues et gestionnaires de l'eau, ainsi qu'aux scientifiques et spécialistes de l'environnement qui s'occupent occasionnellement de rivières