Public attitudes toward medical waste: Experiences from 141 countries

Abstract

Background Medical Waste (MW), conceptualized as waste generated in the diagnosis, treatment, or immunization of human beings or animals, posing massive threat to public health. Environment-friendly public attitudes promotes the shaping of pro-environmental behavior. However, the public attitudes of MW and the potential determinants remained scarce. The present study aims to reveal globally public attitudes towards MW and captured the determinants. Methods We integrated the crawler technology with sentiment analysis to captured the public attitudes toward MW across 141 specific countries from 3,789,764 related tweets. Multiple cross-national databases were integrated to assess characteristics including risk, resistance, environment, and development. The spatial regression model was taken to counterbalence the potential statistical bias. Results Overall, the global public attitudes towards MW were positive, and varied significantly across countries. Resilience (β = 0.78, SD = 0.14, P < 0.01) and development (β = 1.66, SD = 0.13, P < 0.01) posed positive influence on public attitudes towards MW, meanwhile, risk (β = -0.1, SD = 0.12, P > 0.05) and environment (β = 0.09, SD = 0.09, P > 0.05) were irrelated to the shaping of positive MW public attitudes. Several positive moderating influences was also captured. Additionally, the cross-national disparities of the determiants were also captured, more specific, public attitudes towards MW in extremely poor areas were more likely to be negatively affected by risks, resilience and development. Conclusions This study focused mainly on the public attitudes as well as captured the potential determinants. Public attitudes towards MW were generally positive, but there were large cross-national disparities. Stakeholders would need to designate targeted strategies to enhance public satisfaction with MW management.