In the “Water Pollution Prevention and Control Law”, it is stipulated that all sewage containing pathogens must undergo disinfection treatment and meet the relevant standards before being discharged. When it comes to “pathogens”, I can immediately think of hospitals. Medical wastewater discharged by hospitals contains pathogens. In this article, let’s familiarize ourselves with the relevant regulations on the discharge of medical wastewater.

First of all, we need to understand what “pathogens” are and what negative impacts they can cause? Pathogens actually refer to the pathogens of infectious diseases, mainly including viruses, bacteria, etc. If wastewater containing pathogens is discharged directly without treatment, it will cause the rapid spread of infectious diseases, thereby endangering human health. Therefore, wastewater containing pathogens is not necessarily not dischargeable; it needs to be disinfected and sterilized, and then undergo Medical Wastewater Monitoring to observe whether the various indicators in the water meet the standards. Only after confirming that they meet the standards can it be discharged.

Let’s take urban sewage centralized treatment as an example. The sewage collected by urban sewage plants mainly comes from domestic sewage and medical wastewater, and of course, a small portion of industrial wastewater. But for medical wastewater, it can be said to be the main source. If wastewater containing pathogens is discharged directly to urban sewage centralized treatment without treatment, but there are no corresponding processes and equipment for treatment in the sewage treatment process, hospitals need to conduct corresponding pre-treatment until it reaches the discharge standards before being concentrated to the sewage treatment plant.

How to Comply with Applicable Standards? There are relevant standards for this. According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, it needs to comply with the requirements of Section 4.41.4 of the “Water Quality Standards for Discharge into Urban Sewerage Networks” (CJ343-2010), and this regulation is not included in the control items, such as pathogens, radioactive pollutants, etc. At this time, it is necessary to limit the values according to the source of the pollutants and implement the relevant standards.

For the relevant regulations on the discharge of medical wastewater, it mainly involves disinfecting and sterilizing the viruses and bacteria in the wastewater, and then testing the various items in the medical wastewater to observe whether the indicators of these items have all met the standards. Confirming that they meet the standards before discharging into the urban sewage centralized treatment. Among them, the WECT-900 Coliform Group Online Analyzer is used to detect the bacterial content in the wastewater to determine the degree of water quality hazard.