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Preventing disease

Rahul Garg, New Delhi

The illegal market in medical equipment such as disposable syringes, surgical gloves and intravenous equipment has been growing at an alarming rate. The awareness level being low, the use of contaminated syringes and similar equipment in India more often than not leads to dangerous diseases rather than averting them.

The number of people who contract hepatitis, HIV and other fatal viruses from poor injecting practices alone is on the rise. Statistics reveal that the illegal collection of disposed syringes and similar medical equipment and their reintroduction into th e market is evidently the cause of not less than one million deaths per year. This invariably leads to speculation about the safety of the disposable syringes, more so when the Government has been initiating immunisation campaigns to eliminate and contro l various diseases. Hence, it is imperative to find a proper solution to the problem.

In fact, a reasonable solution already exists. What we need perhaps is awareness about it. Making an entry into the medical equipment market are `auto-disable' syringes. These syringes are designed specifically to check the inappropriate use of disposabl e syringes and needles. The best thing about them is that they are automatically rendered inactive after a single use. They are structured so that the piston of the syringe cannot be pulled back after the first shot.

The cost of these syringes is slightly higher than that of ordinary disposable syringes. But when it is health that we are talking about, surely we cannot compromise. In any case, each unsafe injection costs the Government between 3-5 times the extra cos t of auto-disable syringes to treat the diseases transmitted through careless injections.