Waste not, want not...

I don't know about you, but I really don't like to waste things. I try to recycle or repurpose stuff as much as possible and that means bringing home banana peels and plastic clamshell takeout containers to compost and recycle. I scrape out every last bit of peanut butter out of the jar and I will save 1 Tbs of milk just to use it the next day in my coffee. Yes, I am that person. I hate wasting things. And on occasion when I do I feel horribly guilty about it.

During the last 5 weeks, we have talked a lot about medical and surgical asepsis (clean vs. sterile) and that means going thru a lot of single-use products like gloves, syringes, cannulas, dressings, IV tubing, catheters, etc. In America, the land of plenty, there are often plenty of health care supplies around and manufacturers are getting rich off of the single-use products they supply because we want everything to be as clean and/or sterile as much as possible. And asepis is very important, I don't want to diminish that (some of you will recall that I sprayed Lys0l on the dishes before eating off them during a vacation to OCMD), but that approach to asepsis comes at a cost to our environment and our wallets.

Meanwhile, in underdeveloped countries and even some very rural portions of our own country, there are people who are reusing syringes and tubing by boiling them in water and sharpening the needles on a strap. Gloves are washed and reused until they're riddled with holes and then the fingertips are cut off and they're used for wound drainage in lieu of tubing. Often there aren't enough dressings to go around and wounds are left open to the air. In America, once a prepackaged sterile surgical set is opened it is no longer sterile so any remaining unused items are discarded in the trash. The wastefulness is outrageous.

Today, in lieu of going to lab, we went to MedShare. MedShare specializes in collecting medical supplies and equipment from area hospitals in GA and CA and ships them to underdeveloped countries all over the world. They also fund medical missions. An online database of the supplies they have on hand is kept and governments, aid groups, etc. can request a shipping container of the items they need for the discounted price of about $20K-22K, supplies which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They only collect usable items that work (it's not a dumping ground for broken equipment) and their warehouse is full of hospital beds, walkers, crutches, lights, drapes, dressings, syringes, respiratory equipment, etc. You name it, they probably have it. They get so much stuff and this is from only a very small number of hospitals. I think they told us that in the 10 years of their existence they have kept over 1 million cubic feet of medical waste out of landfills. Really, it is amazing. Their overhead is very low; they are getting more support from health organizations by the day; they're being good stewards to those in developing countries while being good stewards to the environment.

So, for those of you who have made charitable giving and/or involvement a goal for the year, I invite you to send a little something to MedShare. I plan to give a little money and a little time. At the very least I hope you'll visit their website.