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

Background: In developing countries, where work is being increasingly mechanised, a number of workprocesses have been developed that treat workers as tools in production, putting their health and lives atrisk. Hence the current study was done to identify the morbidity pattern among stainless steel industryworkers and to determine the relationship between morbidities and other associated factors related to work.Study Methodology: A cross sectional study was conducted in a small scale stainless steel industry ofTamil Nadu. 143 industrial workers were selected by using universal sampling method. Workers withexperience of not less than 1 year were automatically included in the study and those with pre-existingillness before joining the industry were excluded. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the datafrom study participants.Results: It was estimated that nearly 15.4% of employees had work experience of more than a year and84.6% had experience of more than 2 years. Overall prevalence of morbidity pattern in employees as per thisstudy was 95.1%. Most common morbidity among workers was myalgia (50.3%) and second commonestwas mechanical injuries (49%). The association between nature of work and morbidity suggested that59% employees working in powdering, polishing section had history of mechanical injuries and 38.2% ofemployees 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 and42.4% had mechanical injuries, these associations were found to be statistically significant.