The estimated prevalence of exposure to asthmagens in the Australian workforce, 2014

Abstract

BackgroundThere is very little information available on a national level as to the number of people exposed to specific asthmagens in workplaces.MethodsWe conducted a national telephone survey in Australia to investigate the prevalence of current occupational exposure to 277 asthmagens, assembled into 27 groups. Demographic and current job information were obtained. A web-based tool, OccIDEAS, was used to collect job task information and assign exposure to each asthmagen group.ResultsIn the Australian Workplace Exposure Study – Asthma (AWES- Asthma) we interviewed 4878 participants (2441 male and 2437 female). Exposure to at least one asthmagen was more common among men (47 %) than women (40 %). Extrapolated to the Australian population, approximately 2.8 million men and 1.7 million women were estimated to be exposed. Among men, the most common exposures were bioaerosols (29 %) and metals (27 %), whilst the most common exposures among women were latex (25 %) and industrial cleaning and sterilising agents (20 %).ConclusionsThis study provides information about the prevalence of exposure to asthmagens in Australian workplaces which will be useful in setting priorities for control and prevention of occupational asthma.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12890-016-0212-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Questionnaire-based algorithm for assessing occupational noise exposure of construction workers

“…OccIDEAS was developed by Fritschi and colleagues and has been used in research studies of carcinogens17 and asthmagens 18. OccIDEAS contains questions relating to usual tasks a worker undertakes.…”

Australian work exposures studies: occupational exposure to pesticides

“…AWES consisted of two cross-sectional telephone surveys conducted among Australian workers to assess the prevalence of current occupational exposure to 38 carcinogens (AWES-Cancer)19 and 27 asthmagen groups (AWES-Asthma),20 respectively. Ethics approval for AWES was obtained from Human Research Ethics Committees of the University of Western Australia and Curtin University.…”

“…The methodology for both of the AWES surveys has been described in more detail previously 19 20. In brief, each sample was selected randomly from a list of Australian phone numbers.…”

“…Of the 38 051 telephone numbers called over the 6-month period of AWES-Asthma, 10 284 could not be contacted after 10 call attempts, 21 429 households were ineligible and 1318 respondents refused to participate 20. Job information was incomplete for 118 people and complete interviews were obtained from 4878 workers, resulting in a response fraction of 29% and a cooperation fraction of 77%.…”

Changes in occupational asthma during four decades in Slovakia, Central Europe

“…A multinational study revealed that 26 % of subjects reported exposure to vapours, gas, dust, fumes in their work [4]. As much as 48 % of males and 40 % females could be exposed to one or more asthmagens in their work [5].…”