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Abstract
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Injury is a leading cause of mortality and injury-related morbidity, which can have lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, as well as on an individual's and family's economic livelihood (1).
Transport and unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for adolescents 10-24 years of age, with more lives lost than communicable or non-communicable diseases, nutritional or maternal health causes or self-harm (2). Predominantly, in the injury prevention arena, there is a tendency to focus on young (especially under 5 years) children and therefore, despite the persistently high injury burden among adolescents, there has been limited research on, and evaluation of, the prevention of injury-related harms among adolescents.
For adolescents, the farm environment poses a unique risk of injury as it is often a home, a workplace and a place for recreation with adolescents moving between these activities regularly (4). Farms are environments full of hazards such as noise (5), electricity (6), vehicles (7) including off-road motorcycles (8), quad-bikes (9) and utilities, agricultural machinery such as tractors and augers (10), as well as animals (11), plants and the broader environment. Additionally, living and working on farms exposes people to greater risk of injury from large farm animals including horses, as well as drowning risk due to unfenced natural water bodies (12).
In Australia, agriculture as an industry averages 82 non-intentional farm injury deaths per year between 2003 and 2006 (13). In New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, there was an average annual rate of 17.3 work-related deaths on farms per 100,000 people working in agriculture between 2001 and 2015 (14). With respect to hospitalized farm injury in Australia, between 2010-11 and 2014-15, there were a total of 21,999 farm injury related hospitalizations, with greater burden among males and in inner and outer regional areas (12).
Internationally, agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in which to work and this is likely to increase with changes in climate, markets, transport systems and cost, staffing issues and farming practices (15). Evidence out of the United States of America indicates a child dies in an agriculture-related incident every 3 days, with transportation, machinery and contact with animals the leading mechanisms of injury (16). Agriculture has a wide range of hazards such as heavy machinery, chemicals and animals. In non-western countries, varying risks are present such as the risk of injury to toes and figures from hand tools for preadolescent agricultural workers in rural India (17).
Work in and around the farm often consists of tasks which over the course of a day can be extremely varied, each with their own risks. To address this in Australia the hierarchy of control, a framework of measures ranked on level of health and safety protection and reliability of control measures, is now embedded in legislation and provides a framework on which to address safety...
Language: en |