مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بهداشت حرفه ای در کشور هاي متوسط و کم درآمد – الزویر 2018

The provision of Occupational safety and health (OSH) services to workers has long been a global concern. The International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 161 of 1985 [1] and the World Health Organization (WHO)’s 2008e2017 Global Plan for Action [2] both demonstrate the value that the international community has to safety issues. Unfortunately, developing countries are lagging far behind in comparison with their industrialized counterparts, with regard to the provision of OSH services to workers [3e6]. According to LaDou [6], 20e50% of workers in developed countries have access to adequate OSH services, whereas in developing countries, it is only 5e10%. Even worse, in some countries, for example, Tanzania, less than 5% of the workforce has access to OSH services [3]. More importantly, the lack of adequate OSH services contributes to high work-related injuries [3,4,7]. Because OSH legislation is a vital component of injury prevention programs, compensation, and litigation functions, an examination of such legislation for developing low- and middle-income countries may help to identify their current limitations, strengths, and priority areas for continual improvement. Consequently, a review of existing OSH legislation is required. To date, original articles, short communications, commentaries, and reviews on OSH legislation in low- and middle-income countries are limited. Nonetheless, a recent article by Moyo et al [8] raised several critical issues on OSH legislation in Southern Africa using case studies of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia. For example, although this article is rich with details of fragmentation of OSH laws among government departments, it addressed neither how such fragmentation affects enforcement nor how such fragmentation can be resolved. In the present study, this issue was revisited with deliberate attempts to fill this gap. The lack of gender sensitivity in OSH laws has not been addressed in previous studies. In our opinion, this issue deserves a closer scrutiny. Therefore, we provide evidence of lack of gender sensitivity in existing OSH laws, its historical origins, and how it can be corrected. We conclude this issue by detailing the ILO’s standpoint on gender sensitivity in the context of OSH. Moreover, the inadequacy of current OSH laws in the context of the agricultural sector has not received sufficient attention in the available literature. For three reasons, this issue shall receive more scrutiny in our present article: (1) in most low- and middle-income countries, agriculture employs more than 70% of the entire labor force, yet it is not fully covered by existing OSH laws, (2) there is compelling evidence that the greatest number of injuries occurs in the agricultural sector [9,10] although a large number is also recorded in the construction industry [11], and (3) workers are exposed to pesticides from agricultural products [10]. To the best of our knowledge, no documented study on OSH laws has used predesigned review criteria for analyzing these laws. Currently, there are no universally agreed upon international OSH criteria for evaluating the adequacy of OSH legislation. We developed ten-point review criteria and uniformly applied it to OSH legislation of the selected countries (Table 1). The crux of the review criteria was to ultimately influence future OSH policy directions in such countries by unearthing key areas requiring correction.