Common occupational diseases in mining industry
Most of mines have complex geology but the exploitation technology is out of date with manual workers, cruel working conditions, workers mainly do their jobs in deep, narrow and dark mines, usually expose to risk factors that may cause occupational and work-related diseases such as dust from coal, stones, metals (cadmium, manganese) and radioactivity; mud, noise, vibration and toxic gases CH4, CO, CO2 and TNT.
Workers working in mining industry always face up with hazards of occupational accidents caused by falls of ground, coal mine collapses and water breaking out, methanol intoxication and common occupational diseases in mining industry such as silicosis, asbestosis, occupational deafness caused by noise, high frequency vibration, whole body vibration, chronic bronchitis, radiation sickness, carbon monoxide poisoning, trinitrotoluene poisoning and occupational dermatitis.
Real situation of working environment and health of mining workers
Through statistics from research projects show that mining workers have to expose to noise mostly excess the permissible standard and at the highest level at drilling and grinding stone sections (10-18 dBA times higher than the permissible standard). The rate of occupational deafness of workers at coal screening, drilling and stone drilling is from 8 to 23,6%.
In mining process, there are many sections produce dust such as digging and scooping coal, drilling stone, blasting, transporting, grinding, unloading coal and ore. Hence, many working positions extremely polluted by dust with the total dust concentration (30-100mg/m3) 15-30 times higher than the permissible hygiene standard, respirable dust concentration at some places higher than the permissible hygiene standard from 9 to 11 times, free silica concentration from 15 to 21%. The rate of silicosis of mining workers from 3 to 14% in which 70% of underground mine and 19,3% of chronic bronchitis.
The occupational vibration syndrome usually seen at group of mining workers including high frequency vibration caused by using hand drilling machine and whole body vibration caused by driving over 20 ton vehicle. Occupational vibration syndrome of drilling workers with symptoms of vasomotor disorder of hand accounted for around 4,3%, 15% of wrist and elbow injuries; 42,3% of lower back stretching of drivers and 12,7% of waist pain.
Because of wet working environment, the percentage of workers who suffer from occupational dermatitis is about 40,8% in which cutaneous fungus holds the highest percentage of 27,5%. Due to the labour characteristics of mining industry, workers in the same time expose to many kind of hazardous factors and they can suffer from one to more occupational diseases. For example, drilling worker may suffer from both occupational deafness and silicosis or occupational deafness and occupational high frequency vibration; metal mining workers may suffer from lung diseases and occupational toxicant caused by metal components from ore or occupational chronic bronchitis.
In order to reduce the harmful effect of hazardous factors for mining workers, employers and workers at enterprises must strictly implement OSH works in accordance with existing laws and regulations such as conducting periodic surveillance of working environment, strengthening training activities to improve working conditions based on each hazardous factor, providing periodic heath checks, checking occupational diseases to early discover and have suitable treatment, preventing and appraising compensation for losing the ability to work caused by occupational diseases.
(Nguồn tin: Vnniosh.vn)
