Assessing the Occupational and Environmental Health Hazards among Rag-Pickers: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The vulnerability occupational health hazard of ragpickers has emerged as a serious public health threat and has had a tremendous impact on all spheres of the environment nearby landfill and other side of solid waste locations. Since 1970, large numbers of studies have been carried out on the impact of health conditions on ragpickers around the world, but no studies have been carried out on the scientific/systematic review on the impact of health due to their occupational impact at global level. This study aims to systematically assess the scientific review on the impact of occupation on ragpickers and their environmental conditions. For this study, total 339 studies were identified after rigorous review, and 134 studies met the criteria for the review. The literature was surveyed from Scopus, Google Scholar, Research gate, Web of Science, semantic scholar and the Google search engine. The results reveal that (i) most of the studies were carried out continent wise on: Asia, followed by Europe, Africa, and South America. About 69 (51.5%) of the total studies were surveyed from Asia, followed by Africa 32 (23.88%), South America 30 (22.39%), and Europe is only 3 (2.23%) has found in the open database on related to the topic. (ii) in the case of countries, the highest number of studies was performed on India (30.60%), followed by Brazil (19.40), South Africa (14%), Bangladesh (8%), Ghana (6%), Study results out that chemical, biological work place hazard are more risky environmental hazard in their occupations.