J Occup Health. 2009 Jun 18.
Su SB, Wang BJ, Tai C, Chang HF, Guo HR.
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University.
Objective: To determine whether working under relative humidity (RH) around 55 +/- 5% may lead to dry symptoms among workers in tropical regions.
Methods: We recruited 3,154 Taiwanese workers who had no history of skin diseases and compared dry symptoms between clean room workers (RH around 55 +/- 5%) and other workers (RH around 65 +/- 5%).
Results: Clean room workers had higher prevalences of dry symptoms of the eye (odds ratio [OR]=1.62, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.40 to 1.86), nose and throat (OR=2.15, 95% CI: 1.66 to 2.79), and skin (OR=1.46, 95% CI: 1.23 to 1.73). In clean room workers, however, dry skin symptoms affected the palms (OR=1.72, 95% CI: 1.24 to 2.39), which are covered by gloves, more frequently than the face (OR=0.65, 95% CI: 0.45 to 0.94), which is exposed to the room air. We found working in clean rooms (adjusted OR [AOR]=1.38, 95% CI: 1.08 to 1.77), 24 to 30 yr of age (AOR=0.78, 95% CI: 0.62 to 0.99), family history of atopic diseases (AOR=1.75, 95% CI: 1.37 to 2.25), and skin moisturizer use (AOR=1.64, 95% CI: 1.30 to 2.06) were independent predictors of skin symptoms. In addition, working in clean rooms was an independent predictor of dry eye (AOR=1.30, 95% CI: 1.06 to 1.60) and dry nose and throat (AOR=1.70, 95% CI: 1.28 to 2.26) symptoms.
Conclusions: Whereas the humidity in such working environments is not very low, for workers living in a high humidity environment, the relatively low humidity may still cause dry symptoms of the eye, nose, and throat.
2 comments:
What is a clean room?
Could someone clarify what these results imply? Thank you
This is one of those studies where... if you don't know, you probably don't need to (but don't take me wrong please :-) ).
A clean room is a special sterile room prepared for certain types of sterile manufacturing and packaging (for example, eyedrops). They're just saying that people who work in that type of facility are more likely to have dry eye than people who don't.
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