山梨医科大学雑誌　第17巻3号　075-079(2002)

＜Original Article＞
Skin Disease among Nursing Home Health Care Workers
in Australia and Taiwan

Derek Richard SMITH, Yueliang Leon GUO
Yung-Ling LEE, and Zentaro YAMAGATA

Abstract: Although skin disease represents a common problem for health care workers (HCW), the prevalence among Australian and Taiwanese nursing home employees is unclear. Furthermore, differences in skin disease rates between these two occupational groups are unknown. Ninety HCW from 12 nursing homes within Queensland, Australia and Tainan county, southern Taiwan were randomly selected and then examined by specialist physicians to detect the presence of skin disease. Keratosis, dermatitis and skin cancer were more common among the Australian HCW (52.8%, 19.4% and 16.7% respectively) than the Taiwanese (0.0%, 9.3% and 0.0% respectively). Conversely, the Taiwanese had more cases of xerosis (13.0% vs. 0.0%) and scabies (9.3% vs. 0.0%). Overall, the Taiwanese HCW in this study had generally lower levels of skin disease (35.2% vs. 83.3%) and experienced only one-tenth the relative skin disease risk (OR 0.1, 95%CI 0.01-0.3 p<0.0001). We suspect our results may be explained by the high presence of sun-induced skin disorders among the predominately fair-skinned Australian group.

Key words: Skin disease, health care workers, nursing home, Australia, Taiwan




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