Can you reuse an injection needle if you sterilize it?

I grew up in the village and the country was much poorer than it is now. Therefore anything that could be reused was reused, not out of environmental consciousness but out of sheer necessity. It was therefore common to visit your local health centre for your daily prescribed injection(much more common than oral medication) and be asked to wait for 30 minutes because the needles were being sterilized.

Why it took so much time is because sterilization was done by boiling them in water using a kerosene stove and when the centre could not afford kerosene they used firewood, a makeshift 3-stone stove would do. Surprising we completely trusted the process and there were no after-effects in form of infections.

However, I must admit that there were days the injections were excruciating. We never attributed it to the blunt needles due to overuse, it never crossed our minds. We always blamed the nurses. We would say, “Please avoid nurse so and so, she’s always in a bad mood or her injecting skills are wanting”. Those days the nurses were revered, you could never confront a nurse, your entire clans lives were in her hands. The health centre was managed by nurse-in-charge, no clinical officer nor doctor. These were luxuries of the big hospital in the city.

These nurse did everything. If it was beyond them you were referred to the General Hospital 30km away, This was rare. It scared you to death if you were told that your condition can only be handled in the big hospital, you thought about your last will and testament. We never believed anything was impossible for our precious nurses. The Our health care sector has come a long way, although we still have along way to go as you can read in this article…https://www.makaobora.com/bora/kwanjenga/

Source: Quora