Medicina Ocupacional y Asuntos de Salud

Abstracto

Respiratory Symptoms and Associated Factors among Cement Factory Workers and Civil Servants in North Shoa, Oromia Regional State, North West Ethiopia: Comparative Cross Sectional Study

Kebede Siyoum, Kassahun Alemu and Manay Kifle

Background: In Ethiopia, workers are not well informed about the health effects of their work environment and occupational related respiratory symptoms are extensively high especially, in cement factories. Objective: This study was designed to determine prevalence of respiratory symptoms and associated factors among Cement Factories Workers and Civil Servants. Methods: An organization based comparative cross sectional study were done on 266 cement factories and 269 civil servant workers, using pre-tested questionnaire. Simple random sampling method was used to select participants from Civil Servants, while working section stratification with simple random was applied to select participant Cement Factories Workers. The data were entered to Epi-info version 7 and exported to SPSS version 20 for analysis. In the bivariate logistic regression variables with p≤0.2 were fitted to multivariate logistic regression and finally, variables with p<0.05 was considered as significantlly associated. Result: The prevalence of respiratory symptoms was 66.2% in cement factories workers and 31.2% in Civil Servants with a significant difference (p<0.001). The odds of developing respiratory symptoms were higher among exposed groups (AOR=7.60, 95% CI: 4.93-11.89). Respiratory symptoms were higher in ≥45years old workers (AOR=4.67, 95% CI: 1.16-18.74) than <25years old workers. Night shift workers were more likely to develop respiratory symptoms (AOR=2.07, 95% CI: 1.02-4.18) than their counterpart. Having trained in occupational health and safety (AOR=0.18, 95% CI: 0.09- 0.36) and education above secondary school (AOR= 0.15, 95% CI: 0.03-0.78) were protective for respiratory symptoms in the exposed groups. Smoking was positively associated with respiratory symptoms in both cement factories workers (AOR=11.7, 95% CI: 1.6- 85.76) and unexposed groups (AOR=3.4, 95% CI: 1.19-9.05). Conclusion: Respiratory symptoms were higher among cement factories workers than civil servants, so engineering and administrative control measures are needed to reduce the exposure of workers to cement dust.