Latex glove industry: Prevalence of heat‐related illness among Malaysian workers

Abstract

Glove production involves work processes with a high temperature. However, few studies have been conducted on the hazards of high temperature among workers. This study was conducted to evaluate the prevalence of heat‐related illness among glove industry workers under heat stress conditions. This cross‐sectional study was conducted in a glove factory at Selangor. The total number of workers (n = 82) were interviewed using adapted questionnaires. The highest prevalent heat‐related illnesses in respondents were dehydration (82.2%), followed by heat exhaustion (81.1%), heat cramps (23.2%), heat rashes (22.2%), heat stroke (5.6%), and heat syncope (4.4%). The workers are highly exposed to dehydration and heat exhaustion illness. Therefore, prevention of heat stress is very important in this industry. It is the duty of the employers to implement suitable prevention measures to protect the health and safety of their workers. As a recommendation, personal protective equipment such as a cool vest also helps in protection from the hot working environment. The cool vest has inserted frozen liquid placed between the fabrics and is worn on the upper trunk. This helps in giving workers freedom to move around, as it has no attached lines. This suit has a constant and steady cooling effect on the whole body. Besides this, training on heat stress and on the ways of controlling heat stress should be provided by employers. This training program can help in educating and creating awareness among workers on the symptoms of heat‐related illness, which can help in preventing any worst case of heat stress from occurring. The training program may include the description of heat stress, including the symptoms of heat‐related illness and the first‐aid measures for each disorder.

Community Diagnosis Activities in Efforts to Reduce Hypertension Cases in the Working Area of Legok Health Center, Legok District, Tangerang District, Banten Province

“…Brainstorming is done and found that all problems found rooted from lack of counseling Health workers to society and lack thereof awareness public related hypertension. Based on analysis fishbone, then can planned a number of alternative solution problem about risk tall hypertension in Babakan Village, namely do counseling about hypertension covers definition, causes, factors risks, foods that are allowed consumed and what not can consumed by sufferers hypertension, complications, methods prevention as well as treatment hypertension ; do screening hypertension in Babakan [15].…”

Analyzing environmental heat stress under changing work conditions: A sensor‐based monitoring solution

“…Aside from acute heat-related problems (e.g., exhaustion/fatigue, dehydration, heat-cramps, psychomotor performance-loss), chronic health issues, that is, immunological suppressions, heatstroke, renal anomalies risk, and damage issues at the sub-cellular level (DNA damage) are also frequent among workers subjected to hot working temperatures (Jafari et al, 2020;Kassim et al, 2019;Venugopal et al, 2019Venugopal et al, , 2020. In developing countries, insufficient prevention and control strategies negatively affect the prevailing circumstances, thereby deteriorating workers' wellbeing and potential productivity (Kassim et al, 2019;Nunfam et al, 2019;Varghese et al, 2018). One study analyzed the combined effect of increasing temperature and relative humidity in an industrial workstation, resulting in a consequent worker productivity decline (Ismail et al, 2009).…”