What do you do with the medicines you can’t use?

The Covid-19 wave has changed our world tremendously, especially on the vulnerable populations’ health. The alarming mortality rate due to the coronavirus disease, escalating burden of non-communicable disease and threats from the re-emerging diseases. These deleterious circumstances have caused a great hike in the usage of medicines at hospitals, health-centres and households. This could increase pharmaceutical wastes especially the unused medicines which could be due to inappropriate practice of medication intake, non-compliance to treatment or a change in medical treatment.

Medicine is categorised as schedule waste which could be hazardous. Household medical waste includes expired tablets, syrups, capsules, creams and other contaminated medical materials. Most of the households might dispose the medicines by throwing in household rubbish, flushing them in the toilet or dumping into sewers. The main concern is when the medicines are thrown in household wastes, inevitable it will go into landfill and contaminate the ground which can cause harmful consequences on the environment especially water contamination. The improper disposal could also cause the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria strain and could result in untreatable epidemic.

Hence, neither dump your unwanted medicines in the household garbage nor flush it down the toilet or sink. The current water treatment plant may not be sufficient for extracting these chemicals once dissolved. The main concern is when the surface water is contaminated with the pharmaceutical ingredients, it would harm humans, animals and aquatic lives which could be absorbed in the food chain and consumed by us.

By being a wise consumer and concern towards the health wellbeing of our future generations, you can start to collect your unwanted medicines and place it in a separate container and send them to a pharmacy that can dispose it off well. This small step of social obligations perhaps could at least raise public awareness on environmental safety issue.