Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industry like construction, mining. Especially, the livestock farm has various type of hazards than farm cultivating plant. Not only health hazard like organic dust including bacteria/endotoxin/fungi, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, musculoskeletal risk factor but also safety hazard such as collision with pig, suffocation in excretion facility, slip/ trip/fall exist in livestock farm. However, research on livestock were hardly conducted comparing with plant farm owing to accessibility to the livestock farm, geographical characteristic that livestock farm is located far from village to prevent bad smell to spread to house. In this situation, to identify and evaluate the risk factor in livestock farm (pig), the checklist for surveying safety and health status of livestock was developed studying safety checklist used in other industry or country, foreign literature and so on. And then the checklist was reviewed and revised by local public employee under whose charge livestock management was. The final version of checklist category through the procedure is safety and health knowledge and aptitude, preparedness on emergency situation, living environment management, animal contact, dust/gas, STF (slip/trip/fall), and fire safety. Each category has 2~5 detailed items surveying the status of safety and health status in livestock farm. The health and safety status of 223 pig farmers was surveyed using this checklist. As results, farmers looked like knowing what is risky in pig farm and having aptitude to improve their safety and health status with overall checklist item. However, they hardly conducted concrete action for reducing the risk, which means incentives for action is needed. Acknowledgement: This study was carried out with the support of "Cooperative research program for agriculture science & technology development (Project No. PJ008678) Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea.

Biography

Hyocher Kim has completed his MPH at the age of 28 years from Seoul National University School of Public Health. He has been the researcher of National Academy of Agricultural Science, one of the agricultural institutes of RDA (Rural Development Administration) since 2002. He has conducted research about exposure assessment of agricultural work hazard and intervention tool. As results, he published and joined more than 30 papers in journals related to occupational safety and health and have developed more than 20 ergonomic tools and personal protective equipments such as pesticide protecting cloths for orchard farmer and serving as an agricultural safety and health intervention advisory board member of RDA since 2006.