Trashy Days of the Future!

It's true, I took much more beautiful photos of the city today. But this is an entry more for the blog and research than it is for the blip and photography! So forgive me for shorting you on other gorgeous views of Ouro Preto, but enjoy my experience with Universidade Federal do Ouro Preto's Pharmacy School (which oversees their new School of Medicine).

Firstly, it's all about who you know. Thankfully, my friend Daniel, who I met at the Rio consulate, helped me network with the school here and today I met 4 or 5 or who-knows-how-many people in the school here. We talked about their existing projects, the problems they're currently facing (specifically related to waste), and what kind of future projects could exist. They toured me around multiple facilities- a clinic, a small hospital on campus, and the animal testing facility. It was fantastic.

The clinic is currently fully fulfilling a waste tracking project required for certification by ANVISA, the National Health Surveillance Agency. The clinic collects their trash, sorts it, weighs it, and discusses it as a project team once weekly. The goal is to reduce the waste, educate the public (students included), and maintain good national certification for the lab. So they apparently have a lot of data here. This room is the autoclave facility for the clinic. It's small, but they autoclave their solid infectious waste here before sending it off to the landfill. This is different from the US where the waste-handling company does all the treatment and the on-site autoclaves are reserved for the reusable materials.

The two other sites back on the main campus (the clinic is in the historic center) are the small hospital and the animal testing facility. The hospital was CRAZY interesting- a very very small facility with open windows, lots of natural lighting, and some interesting make-shift trash sorting (like an empty plastic Guaraná bottle - think cherry Coke - to hold the old plastic sharps, I believe). I have pictures of the room where they clean the reusable tools- a woman was washing them in a bucket with a towel and then set them on the windowsill to dry! Seriously interesting. I've read some articles that suggest open air hospitals (that don't attempt to maintain 100% sterility) actually may be more effective- as good bacteria can fight off bad bacteria on most surfaces. The hospital had a few waste streams, but was not actively sorting trash just yet (as in, there's infectious, municipal, and recycling, but it's not stringent and they're not quantifying things yet). The whole medical school is very new, but there's pressure from the city for the school to better manage their waste. They'll probably be included in the existing study group soon.

The animal testing facility seemed in dire need of some structural changes. They had good sterility policy- with hair nets, masks, booties, jacket, and gloves (but apparently these measures were new)- and a strict no-entry policy between the birthing/growing facility and testing facility. But they could definitely do with some better flow to greatly reduce the risk of contamination, as well as to just make it simpler for those currently managing the supply and waste streams. There's no easy access to their storage rooms for the animal feed and bedding, and the trash gets moved through the WHOLE facility before it can be treated (if they're reusing the materials) or removed.

And then there's the whole issue of where the trash goes, which this project team is not yet concerned about. They are trying to do their part, but I don't think they have the same attitude that exists in the States in regards to "buyer power" so they haven't yet put any pressure on verifying the proper treatment of the removed waste, though they did say they were interested in securing some certifications from the waste removal services/facilities. From what I've read here in Brazil, there's not exactly clear treatment laws for medical waste (same problem in the US in some respects- well, the sorting is less clear, but the treatment is not) and a lot of what goes out for incineration might not be adequately incinerated. But this is a whole global can of worms as to whether or not infectious waste is as "infectious" as we like to believe and whether or not incineration is a proper protective measure...

So, to say the least, there are a LOT of research opportunities here, and I'm pretty nerdy-ly excited again.