Research

Occupational injury proneness in Indian women: A survey in fish processing industries

Asim Saha^1,2 , Anjali Nag¹ and Pranab Kumar Nag¹

¹  National Institute of Occupational Health, Ahmedabad, India

²  Senior Research Officer (Medical), Occupational Medicine Division, National Institute of Occupational Health, Meghani Nagar, Ahmedabad-380 016, Gujarat, India

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Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology 2006, 1:23doi:10.1186/1745-6673-1-23

Published:	12 September 2006

Abstract

A cross sectional survey was initiated to understand the frequency of occupational injury occurrence and the associated factors in the fish processing industries of western India involving 185 randomly selected women subjects. All the subjects were interviewed with the help of an interviewer-administered questionnaire to collect information regarding their personal, occupational and work related morbidity details (including details of occupational injuries). Logistic regression method was used to analyze the data in order to obtain the contribution of individual factors on occupational injuries. This study has shown that work related morbidity like blanching of hand (OR; 2.30, 95%CI; 1.12–4.74) and nature of job like grading (OR; 3.99, 95%CI; 1.41–11.27) and packing (OR; 5.68, 95%CI; 1.65–19.57) had a significant impact on injury causation. This study eventually concludes that apart from nature of job of fish processing workers occupational hazards prevailing in the work environment contribute significantly to the occurrence of work related injuries and prevention of such occupational hazards may help in protecting workers from occupational injuries also.