Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Research Article

Respiratory Symptoms and Associated Factors among Cement Factory Workers and Civil Servants in North Shoa, Oromia Regional State, North West Ethiopia: Comparative Cross Sectional Study

¹North Shoa, Oromia Regional State, Labor and Social Affairs Office, Fitche, Ethiopia

²Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety, Institute of Public Health, College of Medicine and Health Science, University of Gondar, P. O. Box. No. 196, Ethiopia

*Corresponding Author:

Manay Kifle
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety
Institute of Public Health, College of Medicine and Health Science
University of Gondar, P. O. Box. No. 196, Ethiopia
Tel: +251913372878
E-mail: manay2000@gmail.com

Received date: September 19, 2014; Accepted date: October 25, 2014; Published date: October 29, 2014

Citation: Siyoum K, Alemu K, Kifle M (2014) Respiratory Symptoms and Associated Factors among Cement Factory Workers and Civil Servants in North Shoa, Oromia Regional State, North West Ethiopia: Comparative Cross Sectional Study. Occup Med Health Aff 2:182. doi: 10.4172/2329-6879.1000182

Copyright: © 2014 Manay Kifle et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Background: In Ethiopia, workers are not well informed about the health effects of their work environment and occupational related respiratory symptoms are extensively high especially, in cement factories. Objective: This study was designed to determine prevalence of respiratory symptoms and associated factors among Cement Factories Workers and Civil Servants. Methods: An organization based comparative cross sectional study were done on 266 cement factories and 269 civil servant workers, using pre-tested questionnaire. Simple random sampling method was used to select participants from Civil Servants, while working section stratification with simple random was applied to select participant Cement Factories Workers. The data were entered to Epi-info version 7 and exported to SPSS version 20 for analysis. In the bivariate logistic regression variables with p≤0.2 were fitted to multivariate logistic regression and finally, variables with p<0.05 was considered as significantlly associated. Result: The prevalence of respiratory symptoms was 66.2% in cement factories workers and 31.2% in Civil Servants with a significant difference (p<0.001). The odds of developing respiratory symptoms were higher among exposed groups (AOR=7.60, 95% CI: 4.93-11.89). Respiratory symptoms were higher in ≥45years old workers (AOR=4.67, 95% CI: 1.16-18.74) than <25years old workers. Night shift workers were more likely to develop respiratory symptoms (AOR=2.07, 95% CI: 1.02-4.18) than their counterpart. Having trained in occupational health and safety (AOR=0.18, 95% CI: 0.09- 0.36) and education above secondary school (AOR= 0.15, 95% CI: 0.03-0.78) were protective for respiratory symptoms in the exposed groups. Smoking was positively associated with respiratory symptoms in both cement factories workers (AOR=11.7, 95% CI: 1.6- 85.76) and unexposed groups (AOR=3.4, 95% CI: 1.19-9.05). Conclusion: Respiratory symptoms were higher among cement factories workers than civil servants, so engineering and administrative control measures are needed to reduce the exposure of workers to cement dust.

Keywords