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Thailand has been known as an agriculture country for a longtime. Of 15 Asian countries, Thailand ranked 4th in annual pesticide consumption, 3rd in average pesticide use per unit area. For pesticide production and sale, there are 157 Exporters, 72 Manufacturers, 543 Wholesaler, and 8,075 Retailers throughout the nation. The underlying cause of the morbidity accidentally exposed or intentional. Analysis for the year 2008 had shown that most of the cases occurred by intentional. However 24.56% were exposed to the chemical unintentionally and sometimes occurred in farming. This study aims to explore the risk level and the association of the readiness of community health promoting hospital in providing the occupational health services.
Methods
A questionnaire survey was conducted among 1200 community health promoting hospitals stratified random sampling from over all the country. The contents of the questionnaire including pesticide risk assessment by them to identify risk and checklist criteria to identify the readiness of the community health promoting hospital to provide a basic occupational health service. The associations between the pesticide risk and other variables were analyzed by a multiple logistic model. Odds ratio ( OR )and 95%confidence interval (CI) were indicated.
Results
The average subject age was 39.9 (SD:11.7)yr. for males and 44.9 (SD:12.2)yr. for females,respectively.Farmers trended to use Class IB pesticides 49.0% (e.g., dichlorvos, methomyl, methamidophos) which are considered Highly Hazardous Chemicals .18 % has been identified as a high risk group .Compared with indirect pesticide exposure, direct pesticide exposure had lower percent of person who wearing protective equipments( OR:0.35,95%CI:0.27-0.45)and the readiness to provide occupational health service of community health promoting hospital (OR:0.47,95%CI:0.34-0.64).
Discussion
These finding suggest that agricultural activities within the family are likely to be the major factor influencing exposure degree among studied populations. Special attention needs to be given to occupational health service provision too.