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Syringe Source

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brainiac | 13:38 Sun 31st Jan 2021 | News
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With the news that now over 8 million in the UK have received their first jab, if they are administered by single-use syringes, then where have they got the millions of syringes from? And what happens to them after they are put in the yellow sharps box after use?
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incinerated.
Of course they are single source syringes.
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OK barry, but do you have an answer to either of my questions?
I imagine when the government ordered the vaccines they ordered syringes as one, without the other, would be useless.
They and the vaccine containers will be ground down and used for road surfacing.
It was quite clear within a few weeks of the pandemic that vaccines would be needed to get us out of this crisis. Syringe and needle manufacture was ramped up with the majority of manufacturers in Europe and the USA increasing production to 24 hours per day. There was already a considerable stockpile of both needles and syringes in place in most countries and right now, there's more than enough needles and syringes around.
The irony is that with people avoiding hospitals since the pandemic began, many hospitals have a surplus of both needles and syringes. As they are not ordering more of certain sizes, the syringe and needle manufacturers have been able to dedicate more production lines to the sizes needed for the Covid jabs.
It's too dangerous to incinerate plastic because of the poisonous gases that would be released.
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I was interested in this as a short while ago there was news of a shortage of the glass vials for the vaccine: tens of millions of them (as with syringes) must be needed. Good news for the manufacturers. Still wondering how the used syringes are disposed of.
When I was a nurse, you pinged the needle off into the sharps bin and threw the barrel in clinical waste. It still all got incinerated. Nowadays they have those needles that retract I think
brainiac^^^ 13.21 --this is one way plastic is used.
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Interesting, hadn't heard of that
andres, the principal method of disposal of sharps remains incineration. The definition of sharps nowadays includes the needles, syringes and such things as catheter sets, blades and trocars etc.
Many health authorities now employ specialised contractors to collect sharps bins although GP surgeries still have their bins etc collected by their local hospital from where the contractor collectors them. Incineration on-site at hospitals has proved problematic over the years with HSE regulations becoming stricter since around 1990 and most of those tall chimneys do nothing these days.
Bins containing syringes used with cytotoxic drugs, teratogens and other really nasty stuff have purple lids, but they undergo incineration in the same way.
The contractor call at my university once a fortnight to collect our bins and the service costs quite a few bob annually.
do you remember the boilers in the doctors' surgeries in the sixties
I do
which is lucky because I was using them in egypt in 1980

but I am telling you the plart
in 1962 the govt accepted and MRC (*) proposal that everything should be single use
landfill - so now the q becomes "how do you make plastics degradable?"
and the current situation is no different
(*) foo dey den?

plastics degradable....
the carbon chains shorter
and put in the odd oxygen ( also makes the carbon chain shorter)

the prof probably has a more modern idea
andres "It's too dangerous to incinerate plastic because of the poisonous gases that would be released."
Its not ideal but non recyclable plastics and clinical waste are close system incinerated and the energy produced goes into the local energy production. gasses are filtered and scrubbed before being released from the incinerator.
Thank you woofgang and theprof ^^^^
andres to second woofgangs point, modern incineration units only put water vapour and a small amount of heat into the atmosphere.
tony^^we learn something new everyday.
Peter, yes I well remember the bench-top boilers in GP surgeries and the nurses pulling the syringes out with crucible tongs.

We used the boilers in uni too but devised many other methods of sterilisation. My personal favourite with glass syringes was dropping our Becton Dickinson Multifit's into a flat pyrex glass pan of chromic acid for 3 minutes. A splash was guaranteed to ruin your lab coat along with the shirt underneath. No lab safety superintendents around in those days!

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