MORGANTOWN — In October of 2019, former Milan Puskar Health Right Peer Recovery Coach Dani Ludwig approached Morgantown City Council about the placement of sharps containers in and around the city’s downtown.
A month later, Health Right Executive Director Laura Jones, backed by former Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston, followed up with an official presentation expressing the need for such publicly available needle disposal units.
In January of 2020, former City Manager Paul Brake said the containers would likely be up “in the next few weeks.”
Health Right ordered the containers days later.
Then the discussion just kind of went silent.
Until now.
“The issue never went away. What happened was they were on back order, which speaks to just how much people are trying to get them out into the community,” Jones explained, noting production lags due to COVID-19 lengthened the delay.
“We have them now and the next step is to meet with the police chief and others in the community who have ideas about where they should be placed. Then, we’ll get them up.”
Jones said Health Right is in possession of two sharps disposal containers, and, as previously discussed, will be responsible for placing, emptying and maintaining them.
Representatives of Health Right and the Morgantown Police Department have said the boxes can only improve a bad situation. City police and public works crews, Health Right personnel and neighborhood volunteers expose themselves to bloodborne pathogens and potentially lethal substances cleaning up used needles concentrated around specific locations.
In his 2019 remarks to council, Preston said the number of syringes collected by the MPD prompted the placement of containers in all the department’s cruisers years ago.
The issue, in part, is a byproduct of Health Right’s clean needle exchange, which has operated since August of 2015. Jones credits the program with preventing the kind of HIV outbreaks present in cities like Charleston and Huntington.
“We serve three counties [Monongalia, Preston, Upshur] and we actually have people who come from 17 different counties to receive services because there are no longer any other needle exchanges in our area – Clarksburg closed and Marion County, I think, either has closed or is planning to close,” Jones said. “So we do, probably, last year we did 400,000 syringes.”
A large percentage of those needles are returned to Health Right. Jones said the agency disposes of more than 50 pounds of syringes each month. Clients are also taught how to properly dispose of the syringes per West Virginia DHHR guidelines.
But a lot of needles still end up on the ground. That, hopefully, is where the containers will come in.
“We’re trying really hard to make sure people have access to the appropriate containers they need, even if they are not housed currently,” Jones said. “We’re just glad that we finally have some movement, and we hope to get them up soon.”
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