Comply with biomedical waste management rules:

Anantapur: District Collector O Anand instructed all healthcare institutions to strictly adhere to the regulations prescribed for biomedical waste management, at a review meeting on pollution control measures held at Anantapur Collectorate on Thursday.

He directed government and private hospitals, laboratories, clinics, and diagnostic centres to fully comply with the rules issued by AP Pollution Control Board. Protecting the environment, he said, is a shared responsibility, and violations in biomedical waste handling pose serious threats to public health.

He emphasised that hospitals must segregate and dispose of biomedical waste scientifically, ensuring patient, staff, and public safety. Expired medicines must be mandatorily destroyed and should never be mixed with regular garbage, as such practices can cause severe environmental and health hazards.

Highlighting the importance of proper segregation, the Collector instructed health facilities to use colour-coded bags—red, yellow, blue and white—to separate items such as syringes, needles, cotton, gloves, and body waste.

All hospitals, clinics, and labs must upload daily waste-generation data on Biomedical Waste Management App, and APPCB has been asked to act against institutions failing to submit mandatory entries.

Collector Anand released a wall poster ‘Let Us Protect the Environment from Biomedical Waste’.

Officials from APPCB, health department, public health engineering, IMA, APNA, Government General Hospital, and municipal staff participated in the meeting.