ABSTRACT
The high risk of contagion and affectation by COVID-19 in industrial workers made it necessary to rethink the hygiene and biosafety protocols already established, with measures such as distancing from jobs, staggering entry and exit times, controls temperature, the supervised use of Individual Protection Elements (PPE's) and epidemiological surveillance on personnel, among others. In this research, the ERBioCov instrument is proposed and validated, which aims to assess the proportion in the implementation of new and traditional hygiene and biosafety protocols, which was applied in industries in Lima, Peru in two periods of 2020 and 2021. According to the values obtained, 80.5% of hygiene and biosafety measures are currently applied by the industries studied in Peru, in contrast to the 68.9% obtained in the initial months of the pandemic in 2020, difference for which a high statistical significance was verified (p=3,93E-06;t -5.887). Among them, the traditional measures had a greater increase in their application between both periods studied, reaching from 65.6% to 80.8% (p=0;t=-6.544) compared to the additional measures, which remained at the range of 78.4% and 79.6% in 2020 and 2021, respectively (p=0.7442;t=-0.326). Likewise, a high rate of prevention against biological risks was obtained, quantified in 28 measures applied in a range of 93% to 100% of the participating industries.
ABSTRACT
Environmental pollution begins with the industrial era and increases after the Second World War with the rise of technology. In the 1970s, man began to become aware of the seriousness of this progressive and irreparable damage. Ecology and related sciences are developed and actions are implemented everywhere to manage or alleviate the damage. Pollution can directly alter the components of an ecosystem, water, air or soils, but it can also occur due to the presence of unusual physical or physicochemical phenomena, such as heat or ionizing radiation. Its effects are manifested mainly by damage to ecosystems and therefore damage to the health of human beings, animals, plants, land or water (Nebel, 1999;Clark, 2003). Today the ecological disasters of London, Donora, Minamata, Chernobyl, Bophal, the Persian Gulf, the Danube originating in Baia Mare or those of oil in the seas are well known (Baxter, 1991). In Peru, we know of the environmental damage of the City of Oroya, Lake Junin, the Choropampa spill, and urban contamination by lead dust from deposits of mineral concentrates in Callao. According to the Pan American Health Organization, there are 20,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Amazon Basin (Martin, 2020). Gold miners and illegal loggers are exposing indigenous communities to considerable health risks, a situation that could have severe consequences given the poor response capacity of hospitals and health services in the region. Therefore, the spread of the virus in these communities could imply a tragedy that, in addition to the human losses, could, in turn, affect traditional knowledge and produce negative effects on the governance of the region. As a result, there could be even more deforestation in the future. Differential policies to serve ethnic populations in the region are an urgent need (Bermudez et al., 2020;Velez et al., 2020a). That is why this research set out to establish the Influence of industrialization on environmental health: Historical vision from the industrial revolution to the COVID19 pandemic.