A cow grazing at Kisumu’s Kachok dumpsite. Thousands of sanitary pads are disposed here which pose a health risk to both human and cattle. (Photo: Roberto Muyela)
Stakeholders in the Environment and Health sectors in Kisumu County have expressed concern over the increasing unsupervised disposal of sanitary pads and baby diapers.
They have warned that if no swift action is taken in mitigating this challenge, it will spiral out of control and wreck more havoc in the next five years than the banned plastic bags did for more than a decade.
The Officer in charge of Public Health (PHO) in Kisumu County Arthur Shikanda said that despite used sanitary pads being a special kind of waste that has capacity to transmit infections, not much has been done to ensure they were safely disposed.
Shikanda said that it was very disturbing that menstrual waste was being disposed in dumpsites alongside other household wastes.
This, he said was a perilous trend as children picked and played with them without the knowledge that infections like HIV/AIDS could be transmitted to them if the blood in them was infected.
Skikanda continued to mention that baby diapers had encroached the environment as they could be seen disposed in dumpsites, around estates and alongside roads but he singled out slums as being the hardest hit by the menace.
“Due to lack of sufficient sanitation facilities in informal settlements, diapers have been dumped in heaps and this has pre-exposed the resident to outbreaks of hygiene related diseases like cholera, bilharzia and typhoid,” said Shikanda.
The wastes, Shikanda also pointed out that it gets washed in to drainage systems during rain where it causes blockages that he attributed to a chain of sewage spillage witnessed at the Lakeside city.
The Environment Director in the devolved unit Anthony Aura disclosed that during the rehabilitation of River Kisat in Kisumu in 2017, nearly a ton of baby diapers and used sanitary pads were extracted from the river.
The sprucing activity Aura disclosed saw the planting of bamboo tree along the river in a move to conserve its purity as it pours water into Lake Victoria.
The environment officer revealed that apart from using incinerators to manage medical waste, the shredder and microwave technology (cutting waste in smaller particles then sterilize it by microwaves before disposal) was also used to address this challenge.
Aura however confided that Kisumu only had two safe incinerators; at the Center for Disease control (CDC) and the County’s Provincial Hospital.
He urged the government and researchers to step-up efforts so that more incinerators could be constructed and other safe methods of deposition could be devised since the two available facilities could not serve the whole county.
Aura however stated that convectional burning was not the best way of disposing the waste due to the low heating temperatures involves which he said allowed dangerous fumes to escape to the atmosphere.
This challenge he said not only posed a health risk to humans but also to animals for instance cows which have died due to intestinal blockage after chewing sanitary pads and diapers