Anionic surfactants monitoring in healthcare facilities - a case of Belo Horizonte City, Brazil.

Surfactants are substances that when in aquatic environments can cause negative impacts. Hospital effluents carry numerous chemicals daily, including surfactants, used in sanitization and disinfection procedures. These chemicals are found in the effluents and reach water bodies due to a lack of proper removal in the wastewater treatment plants. The present study investigated data about wastewater monitored from healthcare facilities located in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, focusing on anionic surfactants. The results showed 72 establishments monitoring this parameter, resulting in a median concentration of 1 mg L-1 and 2.49 mg L-1 mean value of anionic surfactants, between 2007 and 2019. It is also observed in the correlation between surfactants and oils in all healthcare establishment sizes, except for the medium-sized. Although anionic surfactants are the most used in cleaning product formulations, cationic surfactants still do not have specific legislation in the studied country that dictates a limit for discharge into sewage; consequently, they are not routinely monitored in effluents. However, these compounds are used in the formulation of routine hospital products.

Generation of infectious waste during the COVID-19 pandemic: The case of a Brazilian hospital.

Coronavirus-19 disease (COVID-19) acquired pandemic status in March 2020. The new virus has caused serious implications in the healthcare services management, including several sectors, among them the generation of waste. Healthcare wastes (HCW) generation increased along pandemic representing a health problem due to potentially infected ones. From this perspective, the study sought to analyse the challenges and changes imposed by COVID-19 in the HCW management in a large public hospital from Brazil. For this purpose, data about the Contingency Plan prepared by the hospital and HCW generation from 2017 to 2020 were used, analysed by statistical methods. When dealing with the Contingency Plan, the Brazilian hospital adopted measures similar to other hospitals around the world as described by the literature, such as: adoption of new protocols, specific team assigned to manage actions and training of professionals and suspension of elective surgeries. Regarding the generation of HCW, there was a significant increase in the mass of biological waste with a high risk of infection. The waste of this group increased from March 2020, coinciding with the start of care for the patients infected by COVID-19. The contribution of this type of waste to total generation jumped from approximately 0.2% in previous years to almost 5% in 2020. In addition, a reduction in the average of total waste generated in kilogrammes per bed per day from 2017 to 2019 was indicated compared to the 2020. COVID-19 pandemic led to major challenges for hospitals that had to care for patients infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including new protocols, changing the work shifts and training the teams in the new procedures. The biological waste with a high risk of infectiousness also increased 30 times.

Water quality index and sanitary and socioeconomic indicators in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Minas Gerais is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil; it is the fourth state with the largest territorial area and the second in number of inhabitants. Since 1997, the monitoring of the surface water quality of the State of Minas Gerais has been carried out. In this study, generalized regression models were constructed to determine the correlation between the Water Quality Index (WQI) and the sanitary and socioeconomic variables: Municipal Population, Human Development Index (HDI), Gini Index, Percentage of Vulnerables to Poverty (Poverty), Monthly Per Capita Income, Percentage of Inadequate or Poor Sanitation. In addition to the sanitary and socioeconomic variables listed, it also used year of water quality monitoring, altitude of the monitoring point, and distance from the monitoring point to the urban center of the municipality. The results from the generalized models showed that the variables year, altitude, Gini Index, monthly per capita income, and poor sanitation variables were positively associated with WQI. In other words, high values of each variable increased WQI, while population variables HDI and poverty were negatively related to WQI, that is, a high population value, HDI, or poverty implies a low WQI value. Socioeconomic variables such as HDI, Gini Index, poorness, or poor sanitation percentage present the coefficients with the largest modulus. Thus, among the socioeconomic variables studied, these are the ones that most contribute to the variability of WQI. The year and altitude variables have positive regression coefficients, indicating that when these variables increase, WQI also increases. The positive correlation with the year shows that the surface water quality of Minas Gerais improved during the monitoring years.