Disposal of unused medications from households in South Bačka District, Serbia

M Paut Kusturica, M Stojancevic, B Stanimirov, N Pavlovic, O Horvat, Z Tomic, A Sabo. Faculty of Medicine Novi Sad, Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Clinical Pharmacology, 21000, Serbia

Introduction: Some of the medications in the households are no longer being used, are unnecessarily hoarded, and often end up as medical waste. Unsafe storage of unused medications in households provides an increased risk of improper disposal, which raises concerns about environmental contamination. The objective of this study was to investigate the quantity of unused drugs in the households and disposal habits of medications of the population in the South Bačka District of Serbia. The seconds aim was to get insight into the attitudes of the population with respect to the proper disposal of medication.

Methods: The study was conducted during a 6-month period from February 2010 to July 2010 and involved a random sample of households in the urban and rural areas of the South Bačka District. The sample was randomly selected from the telephone directories. The families that were willing to cooperate were included in this study. The respondents have to be Serbian-speaking adults (> 18 years of age) responsible for the home medicine cabinets. If the right person was not available, he or she was replaced by another randomly selected Serbian-speaking (> 18 years of age) person in the household or another randomly selected household.

Results: Of 230 families, 208 (108 urban and 100 rural) agreed to participate and complete the questionnaire (90% response rate). The frequency of expired medications was high both in urban and rural households (10.3% and 11.8%, respectively). Medications that were stored in households and no longer being used represented a large amount of medications in both subsamples (16.7% [urban] and 13.4% [rural]).The most common method for disposal of medications in households is disposal in the garbage (85.6% [urban] and 74.5% [rural]) or toilet (8.7% [urban] and 6.4% [rural]). Burning of expired medications in the back yard of the home was also a common practice for medication disposal in rural households (13.8%). The percentage of expired medications returned to a pharmacy is negligible (4.8% [urban] and 4.3% [rural]). According to the rural population, the most proper methods for medication disposal are returning the medications to a pharmacy (41.0%) or burning the medications (33.0%), while the urban population was also interested in discarding medications in special containers placed in the pharmacy (68.5%) or returning the medications to a public health care center (20.4%).

Conclusion: Despite the fact that disposal of medications is a problem worldwide, developing countries are affected to a greater degree. In Serbia, as in many developing countries, public services, including government and health sectors, need to be more proactive about educating patients on how to dispose medications, as well as to be more proactive in finding the most appropriate way of funding pharmaceutical waste disposal.