[Lead intoxication in shipscrapping employees in Taiwan]

The shipscrapping industry in Taiwan is located at Kaohsiung harbor. The scrapping yard at Kaohsiung can be divided into the "Da-Jen" area and the "Da-Lin" area, including 23 and 13 docks respectively. About 5000-8000 dock workers are employed in the yard. Because shipscrapping has been considered to be a "temporary" industry by the secondary metal dealers, so the dealers did not well equip and offer the appropriate safety and health programs for the industry. Of those who work on the docks the metal burners are those most continuously exposed to substantial amounts of inorganic lead and other unidentified metals along with health stresses such as noise, asbestos, explosions and accidents. In this study, 140 oxyacetylene torch metal burners (83 working on scrapping ships and 57 working at the yard) and 21 dock workers without direct lead exposure as the control group were included. The mean values of blood lead and urine lead were 63.22 +/- 22.04 micrograms/d1 and 122.15 +/- 44.10 micrograms/1 for metal burners on the ship, and 65.25 +/- 37.11 micrograms/d1 and 101.54 +/- 37.11 micrograms/1 for the metal burners at the yard, values for the control group were 37.24 +/- 20.63 micrograms/d1 and 67.62 +/- 38.39 micrograms/1 respectively. The subjective symptoms mainly were fatigue, numbness over extremities, headache and dizzness. There were 49 metal burners, 35% of the total burners examined in this study, whose blood lead exceeded 80 micrograms/d1 with more than 2 suspicious intoxication symptoms. The precautions in terms of environmental mornitoring, medical surveillance and engineering control should be taken.