Abstract
Agriculture has the highest risk of accidents. In Brazil the reality of this situation is unknown owing to scarcity of studies and underreporting of workplace accidents in rural areas. This article aims to evaluate workplace accident prevalence and associated factors among tobacco farm in Sao Lourenco do Sul-RS, Brazil. Cross-sectional study with 488 tobacco farmers, assessing sociodemographic, behavioural, labour characteristics and association with workplace accidents occurring in their lifetime. The injury prevalence was 24%. Being male (PR 1.62; 95%CI 1.04-2.52), and tenant farmer (PR 1.87; 95%CI 1.29-2.72), bundling tobacco leaves (PR 2.00; 95%CI 1.14-3.52) and having minor psychiatric disorders (PR 1.58; 95%CI 1.06-2.35) were positively associated with accidents. 46% of serious injuries caused superficial lesions and 26% caused fractures. Rural workplace accident prevention policies need to be established, particularly for tobacco farming. Larger studies are needed to understand work process-related aspects that increase the risk of accidents.
Highlights
Agricultural activities were responsible for 170,000 deaths per annum from workplace accidents, which represent about 50% of the global estimates deaths related to all productive activities[1,2]
This study aims to evaluate work accident prevalence and associated risk factors among tobacco farmers in the southern region of Brazil
About 60% of interviewees started working in farming before they were 13 years old and 38% began working with tobacco cultivation before they were 15
Summary
Agricultural activities were responsible for 170,000 deaths per annum from workplace accidents, which represent about 50% of the global estimates deaths related to all productive activities[1,2]. The variability in the severity and time considered limits the comparability of rates among different studies worldwide[2]. This difficulty is evident when we observe data from population based studies which point annual prevalence of nonfatal farm accidents of 5% in India6, 3.2% in Korea7, 4.5% in Canada over three years[8]. In any case the numbers point to an outcome that due to its frequency, severity and social cost is a very important public health problem This is reinforced by the fact that among all the productive sectors, agriculture has the highest risk of fatal and nonfatal accidents and this situation has not changed in the last decades[1,4,5,10,13,14]
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