Occupational Health Hazards, Stress and Self-Reported Hypertension among Food Crop Farmers in South Western Nigeria

CaHReF 20116, Yaoundé Conges hall, 23 – 26 August 2016 , PL096

Stress is one of the major health hazards which along with other factors can result into hypertension among farmers. This paper analyzed the linkages between stress and reported hypertension among farmers in south western Nigeria. Data were collected with structured questionnaires from 264 farmers that were randomly selected from Ogun and Oyo states. Descriptive statistics and Seemingly Unrelated Bivariate Probit Regression (SUBPR) were used to analyze the covariates of stress exposure and hypertension. The results show that 80.68% experienced stress and 16.28% was hypertensive. Majority of the farmers traced stress to farming activities (37.12%) and financial problems (29.55%). General body pains (39.77%) and lower back pains (25.38%) were mostly reported as occupational health hazards suffered while stress was mostly managed by going to church (34.09%). Also, 35.98% was aware of the association between stress and hypertension. The results of SUBPR show that the model produced a good fit for the data given the statistical significance of Wald statistics (p<0.01) and Likelihood-ratio test of the rho (p< 0.05). Probability of reporting hypertension significantly increased (p<0.10) with stress exposure, formal education, reported water borne disease among household members and recent death of household members, but reduced with income. Also, probability of experiencing stress increased significantly (p<0.10) with reported occupation-related pains, household size, farmers’ income, ownership of house and exposure to resentment at home, but reduced with farmers age and loss of job. It was concluded that efforts to reduce associated pains from farming will reduce stress, which would also lead to reduction in incidence of hypertension among farmers.

Stress, Health Hazards, Hypertension, Body Pains, Crop Farmers, Nigeria