Editorial: Acute and long-term health issues of occupational exposure to heat and high physical loads
Year: 2023
Type: editorial
Abstract: Editorial on the Research Topic Acute and Long-term health issues of occupational exposure to heat and high physical loadsIn recent years, light has been shed on the dangers of excessive heat and the strenuous demands of physical labor in occupational settings.In the case of heat, some of this attention is driven by increased awareness of climate change, making us more conscious of heat events, which are projected to continue to be more frequent and severe (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023).Unfortunately, some of our awareness also comes from the fact that undesired health outcomes have been documented in working populations (Arbury et al., 2014;Heinzerling et al., 2020;Spector et al., 2023).The same is true for heavy or repetitive movements in the workplace where, despite clear evidence that these exposures can cause severe acute (Lucas et al., 2020) or chronic health outcomes (López-Ruiz et al., 2015), workers continue to be exposed in alarming numbers (Lucas et al., 2020).For many populations across the globe, the simultaneous combination of high physical demands, inadequate worker protection measures, and high heat exposure continues to be a major challenge for employers, policymakers and, most of all, workers (Morris et al., 2020).Working in heat, particularly with high physical demands can cause a variety of acute health problems ranging from relatively mild heat illness to a dangerous rise in core body temperature that when left untreated, can have catastrophic outcomes (Sorensen and Hess, 2022).These issues are magnified in populations in the informal sector where individuals often juggle more than one job (Venugopal et al., 2021).Even for those in the formal sector, professions including fire fighters, miners, athletes, agricultural laborers, and soldiers, can be in situations where they are quite literally pushing their bodies' endurance and resistance to the maximum (Lazaro and Momayez, 2021; Carballo-Leyenda et al., 2022;Kim and Lee, 2023).Occupational heat exposure is associated with a number of undesirable health outcomes ranging from headache and nausea to more severe outcomes such as cardiovascular failure (Ebi et al., 2021) or acute kidney injury (Kupferman et al., 2018;Wesseling et al., 2020).Likewise, heavy or repetitive workloads are associated
Source: Frontiers in Physiology
Institutions: Universidad Nacional, University of Zurich
Language: English
Subfield: Occupational Therapy
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,295
OpenAlex ID: W4387518584