A Survey of Current Management Conditions for Infectious Wastes Generated from Osaka Hospitals

Preliminary Study of Treatment of Spent Test Tubes Used for Blood Tests by Acidic Electrolyzed Water

“…Kagawa et al (2006) reported that increase in the use of disposal goods in hospitals greatly contributed to increase in infectious medical wastes at hospitals. It is also already commonly known that plastics compose most of the medical waste in hospitals (Lee et al, 2002;Yamaguchi et al, 2002). It is obvious that the disposal of plastic medical goods will increase further in the future and that the treatment cost of these goods would become a tremendous burden to hospital management.…”

“…Because of the increase in the population of senior citizens in Japan and the increase in people's interest in their health, the amount of used test tubes will be much higher in the future. In Japan, recycling of medical waste is not a common practice, but there has been some research on medical waste management (Kagawa et al, 2006;Tamiya, 2004, Yamaguchi et al, 2002. Recycling of medical waste is gaining increasing popularity abroad, and it continues to attract the attention of researchers (Kushida, 2000;Bohlmann et al, 2005;Lee et al, 2002;Bartholomew et al, 2002).…”