Morbidity pattern among stainless steel industry workers of Tamil Nadu: A cross sectional study

Abstract

In developing countries, where work is being increasingly mechanised, a number of work processes have been developed that treat workers as tools in production, putting their health and lives at risk. Hence the current study was done to identify the morbidity pattern among stainless steel industry workers and to determine the relationship between morbidities and other associated factors related to work.A cross sectional study was conducted in a small scale stainless steel industry of Tamil Nadu. 143 industrial workers were selected by using universal sampling method. Workers with experience of not less than 1 year were automatically included in the study and those with pre-existing illness before joining the industry were excluded. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data from study participants. It was estimated that nearly 15.4% of employees had work experience of more than a year and 84.6% had experience of more than 2 years. Overall prevalence of morbidity pattern in employees as per this study was 95.1%. Most common morbidity among workers was myalgia (50.3%) and second commonest was mechanical injuries (49%). The association between nature of work and morbidity suggested that 59% employees working in powdering, polishing section had history of mechanical injuries and 38.2% of employees in powdering, polishing section developed hearing loss. Among the employees not using PPE, 15.2% of them developed bronchial asthma, 29.3% had hearing loss, 21.2% had skin manifestation and 42.4% had mechanical injuries, these associations were found to be statistically significant.