By JAMEY KEAT­EN | AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

GENE­VA (AP) — The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion says overuse of gloves, “moon suits” and the use of bil­lions of masks and vac­ci­na­tion sy­ringes to help pre­vent the spread of the coro­n­avirus have spurred a huge glut of health care waste world­wide.

The U.N. health agency re­port­ed Tues­day that tens of thou­sands of tons of ex­tra med­ical waste has strained waste man­age­ment sys­tems and is threat­en­ing both health and the en­vi­ron­ment, point­ing to a “dire need” to im­prove those sys­tems and get a re­sponse from both gov­ern­ments and peo­ple.

“Part of the mes­sage for the pub­lic is to be­come more of a con­scious con­sumer,” said Dr. Mar­garet Mont­gomery, tech­ni­cal of­fi­cer of WHO’s wa­ter, san­i­ta­tion, hy­giene and health unit. “In terms of the vol­ume, it’s enor­mous.”

“We find that peo­ple are wear­ing ex­ces­sive PPE,” Mont­gomery said, re­fer­ring to per­son­al pro­tec­tion equip­ment.

The agency says most of the rough­ly 87,000 tons of such equip­ment – in­clud­ing what she called “moon suits” and gloves -- ob­tained from March 2020 to No­vem­ber 2021 to bat­tle COVID-19 has end­ed up as waste. More than 8 bil­lion dos­es of vac­cine ad­min­is­tered glob­al­ly have pro­duced 143 tons of ex­tra waste in terms of sy­ringes, nee­dles and safe­ty box­es.

“It is ab­solute­ly vi­tal to pro­vide health work­ers with the right (pro­tec­tive gear),” Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emer­gen­cies chief, said in a state­ment. “But it is al­so vi­tal to en­sure that it can be used safe­ly with­out im­pact­ing on the sur­round­ing en­vi­ron­ment.”

In the state­ment, Dr. Anne Wool­ridge of the In­ter­na­tion­al Sol­id Waste As­so­ci­a­tion said “safe and ra­tio­nal use” of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment would re­duce en­vi­ron­men­tal harm, save mon­ey, re­duce pos­si­ble sup­ply short­ages and help pre­vent in­fec­tion “by chang­ing be­hav­iors.”

WHO is­sued rec­om­men­da­tions like use of “eco-friend­ly” pack­ag­ing and ship­ping as well as reusable equip­ment and re­cy­clable or biodegrad­able ma­te­ri­als.

Tedros Ad­hanom Ghe­breye­sus, the WHO di­rec­tor-gen­er­al, said the ex­cess waste po­ten­tial­ly ex­pos­es health work­ers to “nee­dle-stick in­juries, burns, in­fec­tion, and af­fects com­mu­ni­ties liv­ing near poor­ly man­aged land­fills and waste dis­pos­al sites.”

The agency called for in­vest­ment in “non-burn waste treat­ment” tech­nolo­gies. It re­port­ed that 30 per­cent of health­care fa­cil­i­ties world­wide – and 60 per­cent in the least de­vel­oped coun­tries – were al­ready ill-equipped to han­dle ex­ist­ing waste loads, even be­fore the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic led to them to bal­loon.