Talk:Sharps disposal

The improvised-containers section as first drafted told the reader which substitute to use. That is guidance, not description, and Project:Manual of style forbids it in article space. I have rewritten it as a description of documented failure modes and of what guidance documents say, which conveys the same information without addressing the reader. — — Hedgerow_Hal (talk) 09:47, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

That is a better version and I withdraw the original wording. The one thing lost is the emphasis: the detergent-bottle case is tolerated in guidance and the drink-bottle case is not, and the rewritten prose makes them look like two entries in a list. Worth a clause distinguishing them. — — SharpsSukhi (talk) 12:18, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Added — the distinction is now attributed to what the guidance says rather than to us. ✓ Done — — Hedgerow_Hal (talk) 08:32, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Noting for the record that the harm-reduction literature is explicit about why it describes substitutes, and that reasoning is now in the article with attribution. That is the right outcome. — — HarmReductionHen (talk) 14:55, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

The 22–31% figure comes from prospective series conducted before hepatitis B immunisation of healthcare workers was routine. The table says "pre-vaccine era" in the basis column, which is easy to miss, and the infobox repeats the figure with no qualifier at all. An immunised person with documented response has a very different risk. — — SafetySignalSid (talk) 11:03, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Agree, and the infobox is the worse problem because infobox rows read as settled current facts. Either qualify it there or remove the hepatitis B rows from the infobox and leave them in the table where the caveats live. — — ClinicCorrespondent (talk) 15:29, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Kept the rows but added the source-status qualifier, and added a sentence in the body stating explicitly that the figures predate routine immunisation. Removing them entirely would understate a hazard that is still the largest of the three for an unimmunised person. — — SharpsSukhi (talk) 09:41, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

That is the right balance. ✓ Done — — SafetySignalSid (talk) 08:14, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

The table is captioned with the memorandum reference, so it is honest, but it is the only colour scheme in the article and a reader will generalise. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland differ in detail, and outside the United Kingdom the coding is unrelated — several jurisdictions use red for all infectious waste, which in this table means anatomical waste. That is a consequential difference. — — BalanceBirdie (talk) 13:22, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Accepted. The honest fix is a sentence saying the coding is national and that colours do not transfer between jurisdictions, plus at least one contrasting scheme. I do not have a citable source for a second scheme to hand. — — SharpsSukhi (talk) 16:08, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

The caution sentence can go in immediately without a second source, since it is a statement about variation rather than about any particular scheme. The second table can wait for someone with the documents. — — ScopeSeverin (talk) 10:35, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

I can source the Australian and New Zealand standard for the waste-container colours if that would help, though it covers containers rather than lids specifically. Will check what it actually specifies before promising anything. — — ImportRecordIna (talk) 09:12, 8 July 2026 (UTC)

§Hazard basis gives per-exposure risks for occupational exposure and then a note saying published estimates for the domestic-waste scenario are scarce. Are they scarce or absent? If absent, the note should say so; "scarce" implies someone could find them. — — PlainNumbersPip (talk) 10:44, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

I looked for this when the article was drafted. There are case reports of transmission following injury from discarded needles and there are surveys of injuries to waste workers, but I found no per-exposure probability estimate for that scenario. "Scarce" is a hedge covering the possibility that something exists in a literature I did not search. — — CitationChaser (talk) 08:58, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

That is a defensible use of the hedge. I would still prefer the note to say what the available evidence consists of — case reports and injury surveys, not probability estimates — since that tells the reader something. — — PlainNumbersPip (talk) 09:26, 13 July 2026 (UTC)