• Toxicological Research
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.329-337
• /
• 2010

Inhaled inorganic dusts, such as coal, can cause inflammation and fibrosis in the lungs, known as pneumoconiosis. Diagnosis of pneumoconiosis depends on morphological changes by radiological findings and functional change by pulmonary function test (PFT). Unfortunately, current diagnostic findings are limited only to lung fibrosis, which is usually irreversibly progressive. Therefore, it is important that research on potential and prospective biomarkers for pneumoconiosis should be conducted prior to initiation of irreversible radiological or functional changes in the lungs. Analytical techniques using exhaled breath condensate (EBC) or exhaled gas are non-invasive methods for detection of various respiratory diseases. The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between inflammatory biomarkers, such as EBC pH or fractional exhaled nitric oxide ($FE_{NO}$), and pneumoconiosis among 120 retired coal miners (41 controls and 79 pneumoconiosis patients). Levels of EBC pH and FENO did not show a statistically significant difference between the pneumoconiosis patient group and pneumoconiosis patients with small opacity classified by International Labor Organization (ILO) classification. The mean concentration of $FE_{NO}$ in the low percentage $FEV_1$ (< 80%) was lower than that in the high percentage (80% $\leq$) (p = 0.023). The mean concentration of $FE_{NO}$ in current smokers was lower than that in non smokers (never or past smokers) (p = 0.027). Although there was no statistical significance, the levels of $FE_{NO}$ in smokers tended to decrease, compared with non smokers, regardless of pneumoconiosis. In conclusion, there was no significant relationship between the level of EBC pH or $FE_{NO}$ and radiological findings or PFT. The effects between exhaled biomarkers and pneumoconiosis progression, such as decreasing PFT and exacerbation of radiological findings, should be monitored.

• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.218-226
• /
• 2015

Background: The present study aimed to analyze the index value trends of injured employed persons (IEPs) covered in Pakistan Labour Force Surveys from 2001-02 to 2012-13. Methods: The index value method based on reference years and reference groups was used to analyze the IEP trends in terms of different criteria such as gender, area, employment status, industry types, occupational groups, types of injury, injured body parts, and treatment received. The Pearson correlation coefficient analysis was also performed to investigate the inter-relationship of different occupational variables. Results: The values of IEP increased at the end of the studied year in industry divisions such as agriculture, forestry, hunting, and fishing, followed by in manufacturing and construction industry divisions. People associated with major occupations (such as skilled agricultural and fishery workers) and elementary (unskilled) occupations were found to be at an increasing risk of occupational injuries/diseases with an increasing IEP trend. Types of occupational injuries such as sprain or strain, superficial injury, and dislocation increased during the studied years. Major injured parts of body such as upper limb and lower limb found with increasing trend. Types of treatment received, including hospitalization and no treatment, were found to decrease. Increased IEP can be justified due to inadequate health care facilities, especially in rural areas by increased IEP in terms of gender, areas, received treatment, occupational groups and employment status as results found after Pearson correlation coefficient analysis. Conclusion: The increasing trend in the IEP% of the total employed persons due to agrarian activities shows that there is a need to improve health care setups in rural areas of Pakistan.

• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.420-427
• /
• 2019

Introduction: To prevent and manage the societal and economic burden of occupational diseases (ODs), countries should develop strong prevention policies, health surveillance and registry systems. This study aims to contribute to the improvement of OD surveillance at national level as well as to identify priority actions in Turkey. Methods: The history and current status of occupational health studies were considered from the perspective of OD surveillance. Interpretative research was done through literature review on occupational health at national, regional and international level. Analyses were focused on countries' experiences in policy development and practice, roles and responsibilities of institutions, multidisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration. OD surveillance models of Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands were examined through exchange visits. Face-to-face interviews were conducted to explore the peculiarities of legislative and institutional structures, the best and worst practices, and approach principles. Results: Some countries are more focused on exploring OD trends through effective and cost-efficient researches, with particular attention to new and emerging ODs. Other countries try to reach every single case of OD for compensation and rehabilitation. Each practice has advantages and shortcomings, but they are not mutually exclusive, and thus an effective combination is possible. Conclusion: Effective surveillance and registry approaches play a key role in the prevention of ODs. A well-designed system enables monitoring and assessment of OD prevalence and trends, and adoption of preventive measures while improving the effectiveness of redressing and compensation. A robust surveillance does not only provide protection of workers' health but also advances prevention of economic losses.

• Advances in Traditional Medicine
• /
• v.6 no.4
• /
• pp.264-273
• /
• 2006

Epidemiological evidences and clinical as well as experimental observations have suggested a link between asthma and occupations. This relationship also involves other aspects like nonimmunologic exposures in the environment that can increase the chance of developing work related asthma and respiratory diseases. The purpose of this pamphlet is to supply information of work related diseases, which will give patients suffering with asthma, an intelligent understanding of their disease, and thus stimulate their interest so that they will cooperate more readily with their allergist. Recognizing the symptoms, causes, risk factors, diagnosis and treatment is an important part of managing occupational asthma and related diseases, so that it helps in decline of this rapidly increasing prevalence throughout the world.

• Journal of Korean Public Health Nursing
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.13-22
• /
• 1998

This study was conducted to find qualitative approaches to occupational reference to group health practices. In-depth interviewing was done on 8 subjects health monitor members, owners and occupational nurses, respectively). The major findings were as follows; 1. Visiting health management Useful services were 'health counseling', 'medical examination', 'providing informations about managing diseases', 'agency business in relation to Labour Ministry' and 'giving a recognition about occupational health service to owners'. Insufficiencies were 'lack of treatment service after medical examination' and 'lack of follow up services constantly'. 2. Occupational nursing service Useful services were 'providing health information' and 'counselling about health'. Major contents of occupational nursing services were 'management of occupational and adult diseases' and 'explanation of the results after medical examination'. Insufficiencies were 'deficiency of the place where group health education could be performed', 'lack of additional or closer examinations needed in counselling' and 'discontinuous selection of additional or more exact examinations'. 3. Health monitor members Health monitor members in industries were classified into two. Some were selected by owners and the others were selected simply by considering their administrative abilities such as proficient management of documents. Their major tasks were to connect workers with occupational health management agencies. This study suggests that programs should be developed which enable health monitor members to cooperate with occupational nurses.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
• /
• v.23 no.2
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2017

The aim of this survey is to investigate the occupational musculoskeletal disease and stress levels of restaurant cooks and to provide a basic data of programs in order to prevent occupational diseases. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 220 subjects in Gangwon province. The results show that there was no significant difference in the degree of occupational musculoskeletal disease between male cooks and female cooks. However, western cuisine cooks were more likely to have a higher degree of occupational musculoskeletal disease than other cuisine cooks and showed a higher degree of occupational stress from work overload as well as irregular meal stresses. Cooks aged from 30 to 40 years showed a higher level of occupational musculoskeletal disease in the neck, shoulder, and hand/wrist compared to those in other age groups. The job tenure was related to the degree of musculoskeletal disease in knee. Additionally, the hours of working per day were statistically significantly related to musculoskeletal disease in the knee and to the occupational stress levels in irregular meals stress. The findings of this study suggest that it is essential to design customized education for cooks to lessen their occupational musculoskeletal diseases and stresses in order to ensure the health and safety of the culinary workers.

• East Asian Journal of Business Economics (EAJBE)
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.1-10
• /
• 2023

Purpose - Beauty service employees who perform emotional labor are becoming an important factor in their duties to be performed at customer contact with the emotional expression norms set and required by organizations and companies. There are health problems for beauty workers due to working environments such as physical, chemical, and social factors. Accordingly, this study presents practical ways to protect the health of beauty workers. Research design, data, and methodology - This review study was conducted by searching PubMed, Google Scholar, Riss, Scopus, and Research Gate. Beauty Health Care, Occupational Diseases, Beauty Industry, Beauty Employees, Work-Life Vallance (WLV). I referred to the keywords such as that. A total of 471 papers were searched, of which 46 were finally included in this study on the PRISMA flowchart. Result: The beauty service industry can be classified as a job with high job stress among the beauty industries, and establishing appropriate measures to effectively help beauty industry workers proves to be an important strategy for maintaining physically and mentally healthy lives. Conclusion - Active research is needed to create a healthy environment with sustainable well-being by identifying physical and mental outbreaks according to the degree of awareness through various causes of occupational diseases such as gender and environment of beauty industry workers.

• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.3 no.2
• /
• pp.92-100
• /
• 2012

Objectives: The French National Occupational Diseases Surveillance and Prevention Network (RNV3P) is a French network of occupational disease specialists, which collects, in standardised coded reports, all cases where a physician of any specialty, referred a patient to a university occupational disease centre, to establish the relation between the disease observed and occupational exposures, independently of statutory considerations related to compensation. The objective is to compare the relevance of disproportionality measures, widely used in pharmacovigilance, for the detection of potentially new disease ${\times}$ exposure associations in RNV3P database (by analogy with the detection of potentially new health event ${\times}$ drug associations in the spontaneous reporting databases from pharmacovigilance). Methods: 2001-2009 data from RNV3P are used (81,132 observations leading to 11,627 disease ${\times}$ exposure associations). The structure of RNV3P database is compared with the ones of pharmacovigilance databases. Seven disproportionality metrics are tested and their results, notably in terms of ranking the disease ${\times}$ exposure associations, are compared. Results: RNV3P and pharmacovigilance databases showed similar structure. Frequentist methods (proportional reporting ratio [PRR], reporting odds ratio [ROR]) and a Bayesian one (known as BCPNN for "Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Network") show a rather similar behaviour on our data, conversely to other methods (as Poisson). Finally the PRR method was chosen, because more complex methods did not show a greater value with the RNV3P data. Accordingly, a procedure for detecting signals with PRR method, automatic triage for exclusion of associations already known, and then investigating these signals is suggested. Conclusion: This procedure may be seen as a first step of hypothesis generation before launching epidemiological and/or experimental studies.

• Restorative Dentistry and Endodontics
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.843-855
• /
• 1995

Occupational Dentistry was introduced in Korea about 70 years ago. During the colonial period occupied by Japan till 1945, there were few documents about industrial dentistry, furthermore most cases of occupational diseases and accidents might have been concealed intentionally by the colonial government. After being an independent country, several dentists made efforts to set up 'Preventive Dentistry for Workers' performing specific oral health surveys, even though which were stopped by Korean War. In 1960s' and 1970s', some investigations of oral status were carried out intermittently for specific small groups;white-collar workers, mentally retarded person, buddhist monks and crews of ocean liners. At the same time there was important study in Korean history of occupational dentistry, which was 'a comparison of the oral hygiene conditions in the female workers of a spinning factory at intervals of 30 years.' In 1980s', young researchers began to give attention to erosion of the teeth due to sulphuric acid in the acid-related industry and dental caries due to sugar and flour in the sweets industry. After being democratic labor union movement activated in 1987, hidden and suppressed occupational diseases under the military dictatorship were exposed and flushed in the newspapers. It was shocking for all people that 15-year old boy had been dead due to mercury intoxication after 3-month employment in 1988. In 1990s', the activity for studying oral status of workers in their workplaces was launched and 'Occupational Accidents and Diseases in Oral and Maxillofacial Field' was published. And also The Korean Association of Occupationl Dentistry was established. Oral health examination of workers at the time of employment and of workers exposed to 5 special chemicals at the time of routine special health examination was adopted in 1992, and epocally oral health examination was also included in periodic routine examination of workers' health in 1995. So, occupational dentistry in Korea should cope with the changing needs of working environment and the altering scheme of health examination.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.24 no.1
• /
• pp.14-37
• /
• 2014

Objectives: Since information on biological factors in the workplace are currently lacking, I wanted to create a handbook of these factors that would be viewable at a glance as a means to more effectively prevent occupationally-infected diseases. Proper information on biological hazards in the workplace allowing the appropriate recognition of the harmful factors is desperately needed. Methods and Results: In this study, I intended to create a high-utility handbook of biologically hazardous agents in the workplace. To ensure its effectiveness, information and references about biologically hazardous agents in the workplace were analyzed and classified and pathogen safety data sheets(PSDS) sourced from the Public Health Agency of Canada were included. I intended to make it accessible from the point of view of workers and their employers. A more effective classification system of occupational infectious diseases is presented, and biologically hazardous agents were classified according to occupations, industries, infectious diseases, and so on. The handbook consists of 60 major kinds of biologically infectious occupational factors that are expected to be generated in workplaces in Korea, and are focused on practical utility. The pathogen safety data sheets(PSDS) of 192 species were also included. To allow more effective management, domestic and foreign laws and regulations are presented. Conclusions: This case report presents general information on the history and contents of the handbook and PSDS, it will also be useful in workplaces if download from the homepage of OSHRI, KOSHA(oshri.kosha.or.kr/bridge?menuID=901).