Occupational Hand Dermatitis among Hair Dressers in a Semi-urban Community in Rivers State, South-South Nigeria
Main Article Content
Abstract
Background: Hair dressers are exposed to diverse potential irritation-causing hair beauty products and therefore, at a high risk of occupational hand dermatitis. This category of workers especially in the developing world like Nigeria, may not be applying requisite safety practices for the prevention and control of possible hazardous effects of chemicals contained in these beauty products. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of occupational hand dermatitis among hair dressers in Choba, a semi- urban community in Rivers State, Nigeria. It also assessed respondents ‘knowledge and behavior towards the causes (or risk factors) and control of occupational hand dermatitis.
Methods: Following ethical approval, this descriptive cross sectional study recruited 108 consenting hair dressers by multistage sampling. Pre-tested, semi-structured, close-ended interviewer-administered questionnaires probed socio-demographics, past medical I occupational history, knowledge and behaviour of respondents towards occupational hand dermatitis. Data collected were later analyzed using descriptive statistical tools.
Results: With a predominantly young (18-25 years modal age range) female (84.7%) population, this study had a prevalence of 34.3% occupational hand dermatitis. This low prevalence was complemented by a high (55.2%) level of knowledge even when there were risk factors (viz: alcohol (41.9%), smoking (2.9%), allergy (9.5%), and chronic exposure).
Conclusion: The study showed that there was a low prevalence of occupational hand dermatitis among hair dressers in Choba community due to a high knowledge of the causes of the disease and good safety practices towards prevention and control. It is recommended that health education be sustained and extended to other communities
Downloads
Article Details
Section
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Journal is owned, published and copyrighted by the Nigerian Medical Association, River state Branch. The copyright of papers published are vested in the journal and the publisher. In line with our open access policy and the Creative Commons Attribution License policy authors are allowed to share their work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations. While the advice and information in this journal are believed to be true and accurate on the date of its going to press, neither the authors, the editors, nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.
TNHJ also supports open access archiving of articles published in the journal after three months of publication. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g, in institutional repositories or on their website) within the stated period, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access). All requests for permission for open access archiving outside this period should be sent to the editor via email to editor@tnhjph.com.