Did you know that many medical instruments used to check your temperature or blood pressure are toxic?

Mercury, a liquid metal with unique properties required in measuring temperature and pressure, has long been used in thermometers and sphygmomanometers inside hospitals.

Though mercury sounds useful, it is highly toxic. Exposure to mercury may be fatal and might result to tremors, impaired vision and hearing, paralysis, insomnia, emotional instability, defects in fetal development and retardation.

Almost all hospitals in the Philippines are highly dependent on mercury-based facilities, which make patients more prone to exposure to mercury.

“In a survey recently conducted, about 100 thermometers are broken accidentally every month inside hospitals, with one thermometer containing 80-100 millimeters of mercury,” Josh Karliner, International Team Coordinator of Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), said on Thursday.

Realizing its danger to health and the environment, health groups like HCWH, a policy advocacy group campaigning for an environmentally-responsible healthcare, intensified its campaign to phase out mercury-containing devices in hospitals.

“Everywhere around the world, people are recognizing the urgent need to phase out mercury. The risk to people, wildlife, and the environment is an acknowledged fact,” said Faye Ferrer, program officer of HCWH.

RP to lead mercury phase-out

The campaign for safer medical instruments, which started in the United States in 1997, is beginning to gain ground in the Philippines. Health groups are discouraging the use of toxic facilities inside hospitals and are pushing for digital and aneroid (a barometer that measures pressure without using fluids) devices as alternatives.

“The Philippines is leading the way for its southeast Asian neighbors and other developing countries with the recent signing of the Department of Health (DOH) Administrative Order mandating the phase-out of mercury-containing devices in all Philippine healthcare facilities by 2010,” Karliner added.

Though the Administrative Order was already issued, the DOH has yet to determine a safer method to permanently dispose the mercury-based devices, which will soon be carted out from the hospitals. Meantime, it has only advised hospitals to temporarily store the toxic medical facilities in areas free from breakage or spillage.

Costs of shifting

Ferrer said the cost of digital and aneroid facilities, though manufactured abroad, are close to the prices of mercury-based medical instruments, with digital thermometer at P20 each and sphygmomanometers at P7,000 per unit.

She also said the cost of mercury thermometers, accidentally broken inside hospitals, exceeds the cost of digital and aneroid devices.

While the DOH initiated the gradual phase-out of mercury in all Philippine health care facilities and institutions, the capacity of the government to support the policy is still a question.

‘The government can fund the alternative facilities, but it’s a matter of allocating resources,” the HCWH said, referring to whether the government is receptive to the campaign.

“The Department of Health pushed for an alternative budget initiative and told us that there’s a fund allocated for the order to phase-out mercury devices,” the HCWH said.

It added that the HCWH already gave P13.2 million to 66 DOH hospitals to help them shift to digital or aneroid devices.