Category A Waste Management Tips for Ebola Virus Disease
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When treating a patient with Ebola virus disease, hospitals and health care providers must safely handle, transport, and dispose of waste.
Dr. Shawn Gibbs, PhD, MBA, CIH executive associate dean and professor with Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington, provided recommendations for Category A waste management when treating patients with EVD. Dr. Gibbs has more than one hundred peer-reviewed papers in industrial hygiene and environmental exposure assessment, focusing on environmental microbiology and disrupting transmission of highly hazardous communicable diseases. His research has helped determine national policies, procedure, and best practices for treating patients with Ebola virus disease and other highly infectious diseases, including patient transportation, waste handling/disposal, patient discharge, patient remains, PPE donning and doffing, and decontamination.
- Vet your facility’s waste management plan through leadership and staff, as well as appropriate state and local officials.
- Ensure that your facility’s waste handling contractor can receive a special permit for Category A waste, as most facilities will not have autoclaves or incinerators on-site.
- Understand and comply with the Department of Transportation’s “Guidance for Transporting Ebola Contaminated Items, a Category A Infectious Substance,” as both you and your waste management contractor will be held responsible.
- Identify and appropriately train those who will be responsible for the handling and packaging of your waste.
- Create a waste-reduction plan to reduce the generation of Category A waste, such as the removal of unnecessary packaging or other items before entering the patient care or other potentially contaminated areas.
- Educate health care workers on how to dispose properly of items that become Category A waste, such as not compressing or over-filling waste containers in the patient care room, segregating liquid and solid waste, and separating and correctly processing explosive hazards, like batteries, that cannot enter the standard Category A waste stream.
- Create an intra-facility transport plan for safely moving packaged waste from the point of generation to the secure storage area, and then to the transport loading area; this should include a spill kit.
- Understand that safe and secure storage of Category A waste is a necessity, and there will be a higher volume of waste than you anticipate.
- Exercise waste-handling standard operating procedures.
NETEC Resources:
- Safe Handling, Treatment, Transport and Disposal of Ebola-Contaminated Waste
- Interim – Planning Guidance for the Handling of Solid Waste Contaminated with a Category A Infectious Substance
- CDC: Ebola-Associated Waste Management
- ASPR Tracie: Ebola Waste Management
- UNMC: Waste Removal Process (Categories A and B)
- Are You Preparing Suspected Ebola-Contaminated Waste for Transportation?