Prevalence of Occupational Exposures in Ethiopia: Systematic Review

Because, today, the world is suffered from chronic diseases which their etiologies are chemical and psychosocial hazards. Among them, the cancer and respiratory problems are the common which challenges of both developed and developing countries. Majority of its exposures are workplace. These challenges are very common in developing countries like Ethiopia. Similarly, the main objectives of this was to explore the prevalence of the occupational exposures in Ethiopia. Systematic review was applied to search scientific articles based on keywords, titles, and other searching strategies. All searching engines were applied like PubMed, web of science, Scopus, embase and google scholar. Eligibility criteria was conducted based on the exclusion and inclusion rules. Occupational exposure in Ethiopia is very vast and complicated since its sources are not quietly addressed whereas occupational health services at workplace is infant stage. The literatures review conducted also revealed that occupational exposures to variety of the hazards were highly prevalent in occupational respiratory symptoms followed by needle stick and sharp materials injuries, especially for health care workers. The occupational dust exposures are significantly happened in both cement and coffee processing factories. The researches related to occupational lead and pesticides exposures are almost none, which needs attention in the next research gaps. Occupational exposure with radon at workplace was associated with a 2.62% increase (95% CI 2.52%; 2.73%) in mortality, independent of PM2.5 exposure which large mortality risks were observed among individuals from respiratory, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases which has highest association with others health problems. Preliminary assessment and environmental cleaning with appropriate protective device might be decreased the exposure. According to this review analysis, the occupational exposure with respiratory symptom was prevalence (85%) in cement factories followed by 78% in coffee processing factory. There was no intervention taken by the reviewers to indicate the reducing level of the exposure. However, as were recommended by the original researchers of those reviewed articles, wearing of protective devices and conditioning of the working environments can be reduce the exposure level of the workers at workplace. Pre intervention to workplace hazards is very important to minimize the exposure level at workplace and to reduce the cost of treatments. From these results point of view, conditioning(ventilating) the workplace, providing protective devices and designing appropriate engineering controls to minimizing the exposures  levels are  the key  factors to reduce medical costs.