After Needle Sticks Employee, Niceville Manager Makes Plea to Residents About Flushable Wipes
In Brief:
•A Niceville city worker was pricked by a needle while clearing a sewer blockage caused by “flushable wipes.”
•City Manager David Deitch criticized improper disposal of hazardous materials and urged residents to stop flushing wipes and needles.
•While HIV infection risk from needlestick injuries is low, hepatitis B remains a significant health concern for affected workers.
Niceville’s Manager, David Deitch, had fury in his voice at the city’s monthly business meeting.
The city manager, who has varied from joke-cracking to business-like during his last year or so in the driver’s seat of the city administration, said he had good reason for this anger. Earlier in the month, he says one of the city’s water and sewer employees was pricked by a used needle for attempting to clean out ‘flushable wipes’ from a sewer clog in the city’s underground piping network.
“So I am pissed off at whoever put the damn drug needles in the sewer system in the first place,” Deitch said, “he’s going to be getting tested, medically tested for months and months and months for HIV and hepatitis and everything else because somebody put drug needles in the toilet, and this happens all the time, so I’m begging please stop putting those flushable wipes and diapers and everything else because it was that needle was concealed in that material.”
Okaloosa County’s Water and Sewer Department has had campaigns against flushing the so-called flushable wipes down the toilets of the area for some time now.
According to to Protect Your Pipes, an initiative of the Metropolitain Washington Council of Governments, baby wipes, and other similar wipes are ‘non-dispersable material,’ which can clog pipes and cause issues in homes and for water and sewer departments nationwide.
The wipes stay solid as they go through the sewer system, which leaves opportunities for the wipes to build up and cause sewer system issues.
According to Aidsmap, a charity based in the UK that focused on HIV/AIDS information, “the risk of infection following a needlestick is very low,” and “there have been no definite cases of. HIV infection among healthcare workers following an occupational needlestick injury in the UK since 1999”. The National Institutes for Health, a United States Government Agency, says the more dangerous risk comes not from needlesticks from HIV+ patients, but from those with hepatitis B or C. “Of the viruses, the most common organism acquired via a needlestick injury is hepatitis B. About 30% to 50% of individuals who do contract hepatitis B may develop jaundice, fever, nausea, and vague abdominal pain. In most individuals, these symptoms will spontaneously subside in 4 to 8 weeks. About 2% to 5% of the individuals will go on to develop chronic infection with hepatitis B. Over a lifetime, there is a 15% risk that these individuals will develop liver cancer or cirrhosis. Over twenty years ago in 1997, data from the CDC National Hepatitis Surveillance revealed that there were nearly 500 healthcare workers who acquired hepatitis B from a needlestick injury. This was a significant decline from the previously high 17,000 new cases diagnosed in 1983. A report done in 2009 reported that there were 1550 hepatitis B cases from occupational exposure, of which only 13 were related to employment in a healthcare field with exposure to blood. This decline has chiefly been attributed to the universal availability of the hepatitis B vaccine and the application of universal precautions. Before the availability of the hepatitis B vaccine, the infection rate from a needlestick ranged from 6% to 30%.”
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