Safety behavior of agricultural workers around face mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Agricultural labor-intensive activities have been threatened by COVID-19. Wearing a face mask has been introduced as one of the personal protective equipment (PPE) to reduce COVID-19 risk. OBJECTIVE: The present study aimed to investigate the safety behavior of urban green space workers around wearing a face mask in the time of COVID-19 before vaccination. METHODS: The personal and safety backgrounds of 61 male participants were collected using a designed questionnaire. The nonparametric correlation coefficient of Spearman and logistic regressions were used to investigate the relationships among variables. RESULTS: Above one-third of workers (37.7%) got COVID-19 in the past year. Although all of the participants were aware of wearing a face mask is a protocol against COVID-19, only about half of them (50.8%) completely wear face mask at work. Non-smoking participants were 5.5 times more likely to influence their personal preference on wearing the mask. CONCLUSION: Safety attitude may be a key variable in relation to the factors that influence the wearing face mask. The causes of face mask-wearing during a pandemic such as COVID-19 as well as safety attitudes may be behind the factors studied in this study. Although some significant linkages were found, they were not enough to conclude a comprehensive action program. This concern is still open to discovering factors that influence wearing face mask.

Unmasking the determinants of knowledge, attitude and practice of Personal Protective Equipment use among Nepalese farmers using pesticides

“…Further, the odds of using PPE were found to be substantially lower among the farmers who were involved in farming for more than 10 years. A similar finding was seen in a study conducted in India where the farmers who had mean 18 years old farming exposure were not following safety practices [29]. This could be because those farmers may have developed sense of confidence in their work and have less perceived risk in their work by underestimating the potential hazard of pesticide and have a false belief that they can manage the risk without the use of PPE.…”

“…The COVID pandemic heightened the awareness about PPE for disease prevention and led to the heightened demand and usage of PPE. The increase in production and distribution led to an increased availability, leading to an increased proportion of PPE use among farmers in our study [29]. However, it is contradicting, as our study also showed that more than half of the population of farmers do not use basic set of PPE while handling pesticides, which implies that farmers in Nepal are still at high risk of developing various pesticide-related-illnesses.…”

“…The plausible reason behind this may be because the farmers who were using pesticides for a longer time might be more familiar with the potential health hazards or might have experienced side effects and may be more familiar about the safety measures to reduce the risk. Moreover, as farmers accumulate years of experience, they often become more attuned to industry recommendations and regulatory guidelines regarding safety practices [29]. Likewise, the farmers who were exposed to pesticides for 10 hours or more in their lifetime were more likely to use PPE.…”

“…Likewise, the farmers who were exposed to pesticides for 10 hours or more in their lifetime were more likely to use PPE. This might be because the farmers might perceive that an exposure to pesticides for a longer period can cause deleterious effects which has also been mentioned in theory of toxicology [29,31].…”

“…Categorization of the socioeconomic status was done based on the total score obtained from the above three variables. Socioeconomic status was categorized as lower (<5), upper-lower (5-10), lower-middle (11)(12)(13)(14)(15), upper-middle (16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25), and upper (26)(27)(28)(29). The lower and upper-lower category were categorized as poor, lower-middle was categorized as middle, and upper-middle and upper were categorized as rich.…”