Anthropology of Health and Occupational Hazard

Anthropology of Health and Occupational Hazard

Occupational health aims at the promotion and maintenance of the highest degree of physical, mental and social well being of worker in all occupations and not mere absence of disease or infirmity (WHO, 1948).

In India the traditional public health concerns likes communicable diseases, malnutrition, poor environmental sanitation and reproductive health care get emphasis and priorities in the health policy. Recent industrialization and globalization are changing the occupational morbidity drastically, new pathologies like cancers, stress, AIDS, geriatrics, psychological disorders and heart diseases are on rise. This transition poses new challenges to health care system with new concepts of environmental legislation, ethical issues, new safety regulations, insurance and high costs of healthcare.

Traditionally labor-oriented markets are changing towards more automation and mechanization, at the same time general awareness about occupational safety, occupational and environmental hazard is limited in the society. With these structural changes the workers in low resources settings are more likely to be affected by the dangers of high technology than their counterparts in developed countries. Due to lack of education, lack of awareness about the hazards of their occupations, general backwardness in sanitation, poor nutrition and proneness to epidemics aggravate their health hazards from work environment.

In our country local medievalism and multinational modernism exist side by side, so the research on incidence, prevalence and prevention will have to address the needs in terms of future occupational health policy in India. The research approaches need to balance between understanding the modern industrial exposures and health risks of traditional sectors like Textile and small scale industries. So far not much attention has been drawn about the plight of Textile Workers and those working in several unorganized sectors. Being exposed to extreme dusty environmental conditions, chemical and poisons and mechanical hazards much attention is needed to reduce the accidents and diseases in these groups. Despite proper evidence from epidemiological data or information systems, meager information is available from small-scale and community based studies, which may be used for exploratory understanding of the occupation health situation in India.

Occupational health programmes basically aim to protect the health of employees. Unfortunately, in India these programmes are not given due importance. The National Commission on Labour had lamented: The loss of life through the slow and agonising process of an occu­pational disease may not stir the community as much as it would in other countries, although to the near ones it is a tragic occur­rence. Relief gets organized soon after the events but the preven­tion, which is the most important component itself, gets side-tracked.