Healthcare workers risk getting asthma on the job

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Healthcare workers are at risk for occupational asthma, according to new data from four state-based surveillance systems that monitor work-related asthma cases. Latex and disinfectants are the main culprits.

The findings are important due to the “size and projected growth of the healthcare industry,” investigators note in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

Over a 5-year period, healthcare workers accounted for 16 percent (n=305) of all confirmed cases of work-related asthma (n=1,879) reported in the four states, but only 8 percent of the states’ workforce, they report.

"Despite demographic and employment pattern variations across the four states (California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey), healthcare emerged as the first or second most frequently reported industry among all cases of (work-related asthma) reported from 1993 to 1997, and in proportions exceeding their workforce representation,” they point out.

Most of the healthcare workers (67 percent) developed “new-onset” asthma. “These were primarily nurses or other healthcare workers who had never had asthma in their lives, or who had been symptom-free for two years or more,” said lead author Elise Pechter, an industrial hygienist in the occupational health surveillance program of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

The most common exposures among healthcare workers with work-related asthma were to latex and disinfectants that can cause asthma, and to numerous other chemicals that can exacerbate asthma, including cleaning products, renovation materials, mold and poor indoor air quality.

“Work-related asthma among healthcare workers can be prevented,” Pechter emphasized, “by replacing powdered latex gloves with non-latex or low-allergen powder-free gloves and using disinfectants selectively.”

“The lessons from these surveillance data are important in reducing the burden of asthma in the US population and reducing risk factors for hundreds of thousands employed in the healthcare industry,” she and colleagues conclude.

SOURCE: American Journal of Industrial Medicine March, 2005. 

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