Syringe Tides: Disposable Technologies and the Making of Medical Waste

How does medical technology become medical waste?

Early in the summer of 1987, a few stray plastic syringes washed ashore on the New Jersey coastline. Within weeks, hundreds and then thousands followed, leading to the closure of a 50-mile stretch of beaches during peak tourist season.

Just a few decades earlier, these syringes would have been reusable glass-and-steel devices sterilized between uses. But with the marketing of plastic syringes in the 1960s and an explosion of demand for single-use medical plastics in the 1970s, the single-use syringe had become the most visible form of medical waste by the late 1980s, now swelling the landfills of New York City and occasionally making the short ocean migration to the Jersey Shore.

As newspapers and TV news made these syringe tides into media events, the initial promise that disposable devices would protect people from contamination was inverted, and used needles on the shore now threatened to infect passing beachgoers with hepatitis and AIDS.

The crisis of the syringe tides would lead to a series of House-Senate hearings, the 1988 passage of the Ocean Dumping Ban Act and Medical Waste Tracking Act, and new federal definitions of “medical waste” as a legal category.

Using media coverage, legal documents, and thousands of pages of legislative hearings, Greene traces the transformation of the single-use syringe from a new public health technology into just another form of trash.

Lecture will be followed by a show-and-tell of related items from The Huntington’s collections with Molina Curator for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Dr. Joel A. Klein.

This event is co-sponsored by the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine.

Dr. Jeremy Greene, M.D., Ph.D., M.A., is the William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, the director of the Department of the History of Medicine, and the founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.