Medical Tourism, Biomedical Wastes and Health Hazard

Abstract

The term hazard means occurrence of an event exceeding threshold point or tolerance limit. The hazard may be classified as natural, quasi-natural and man-made or anthropogenic among which the third one is considered to be the most critical one developed as a direct consequence of illogical man-environment interaction system. Biomedical waste has the potential to create hazardous environment. These wastes, generated in both government and private health care units, pathological laboratories, research laboratories, etc. refer to different types of biodegradable and non-degradable, hazardous and non-hazardous materials. Traditionally, all such types of wastes would be dumped into common municipality vats and would be mixed with other types of municipality wastes. Such disposal system of biomedical wastes would create a threat to the health of not only of the persons engaged in health service related activities, but also of other people living in adjacent areas. A framework for biomedical waste disposal system, formulated by the Government of India in 1998, has been implemented and in use in the State of West Bengal. However, due to lack of perception among different stakeholders, implementation of such a system cannot prevent health hazard created by disposal of biomedical wastes. In recent times, the problem of hazard has become very critical mainly due to increasing flow of patients from foreign countries in the form of medical tourism. In fact, medical tourism in India contributes an extra inflow of patients at the rate of about 30% per year. As a resultant effect, a huge amount of biomedical wastes are generated every year by migrant patients imposing an additional load to both environmental threshold and environmental cost. The present study is aimed to estimate the biomedical wastes generated by medical tourists as well as to find out the types, causes and magnitude of health hazard problem generated by biomedical wastes. As a remedial measure, an environmental service tax needs to be imposed on the medical tourists to solve the problem of extra environmental stress created by them.