| Summary: | 碩士 === 長榮大學 === 職業安全與衛生研究所 === 95 === With the life style changing and the quality of living on the rise, frozen food has become an essential necessity in modern daily lives, and as a result, domestic low temperature food consumption has significantly increased. By implementing work environment measurement and questionnaire, we inquired the relationships of domestic labor in the low temperature environment workplace to provide the information for labor safety and health in low temperature work management, as well as to improvise a viable strategy for protecting the health of workers.
The research targeted two refrigeration factories in southern Taiwan. 75 workers in the low temperature workplace (low temperature group) are randomly selected, and the control group consists of 19 workers in the front office and the quality control department, a total of 94 workers. The inquiry includes workers’ basic information, work type, living habits, family history of the allergies and diseases, skin diseases, work-related disease/illness and self-awareness of hand, foot, eyes, ear, nose, larynx, skin, muscle, and skeleton. The data was analyzed with the SAS windows 8.01 version software.
Among the research subjects, the majority of workers’ age falls in the range of 31-39 years old. Around 50% of the workers in the low temperature group suppress urine regularly as a habit. The workers are exposed mainly to cold contact or cold soak. Personal protection equipments are generally only mouth-muffle, gloves, protection dress, hat and rubbers without proper insulation function. The majority of work involves the repetition of a certain task. There are high percentage of work-related injuries that include slipping, falling, and cuts.
From the self-awareness prevalence of workers’ hands and feet, we find that repetition work causes pain in a particular body part. In addition, contact in low temperature workplace also results in the temperature-related iciness and frozen stifness in fingers, and the lack of dexterity in hands. Other groups that include dissimilar work descriptions and repetition work also have work-related injuries that consists of fingers benumbed, finger aches, wrist aches, or itching and swelling in the hands. It is probably due to extended standing and dipping in the low temperature liquid to cause feet stiffness, numbness, and aches. The highest prevalence of ENT self-awareness in the low temperature group are runny noses and sneezing. The main reason may be workers in low temperature group working under the low temperature inhale cold air for extended periods of time. The control group may also have these symptoms by regularly passing in and out of a workplace with drastically variating temperatures.
The workers in the low temperature workplace have to regularly and often come into physical contact with cold objects and continuously perform repetition work, making it a bad work environment most of the time. It is worthy to study and evaluate the hazards in low the temperature workplace.
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