Publication:

Evaluation of Bohicon cotton ginning factory workers respiratory health using chest radiography

Background Chest radiography is widely used to monitoring the occupational lung disease caused by the inhalation or ingestion of dust particles. Our goal was to explore the respiratory system disease among cotton ginning workers at Bohicon using radiography.

Methods We performed cross-sectional descriptive from February 25 to June 11, 2015. It included 110 cotton ginners selected from the 416 workers of ginning factory.  The study participant underwent a survey and a postero-anterior chest X-ray, respectively. Radiographic examinations were performed with a conventional radiographic device. The radiograms were acquired on analog and were developed with automatic processor. The interpretation has been performed by a radiologist. We performed the data analysis with Epi Info 6.5 software.

Results The mean age of our sample is 33.96±4.22 years with a minimum age of 19 and a maximum of 56 years. Also, it should be noted that 89.1% of workers had between one year and 10 years of work experience. Chest tightness and cough are the most respiratory symptoms raised among its workers. 78.18% of workers said they had cough and 55.45 admitted to having chest tightness. Bronchial lesion was the most observed (70.90%) followed by plural lesion (07.26%). Only seven (07) over 110 (7.28%) participants had a lung lesion.

Conclusions In according our result, chest radiography could be used to respiratory health monitoring for the highlighting bronchial, lung and pleural lesion. A large case-control study will be performed to confirm our findings about this population.