Occupational injury in animal agriculture affects not only the health and well-being of workers, but is a significant burden to the agriculture industry due to lost productivity and compensation costs. There is significant interest in reducing the burden of injury, however the tools available for specific injury prevention activities are limited. People working in the animal agriculture industry may encounter a number of health and safety risks on a daily basis. Contact with animals, working on uneven and slippery surfaces, repetitive motions in ergonomically compromised positions, and using powered machinery, are examples of routine hazards. In addition to the potential injury risks, the amount of lost work time, lost productivity, and increased medical and operational costs present a significant burden to the industry. To properly characterize the burden of injury, identify opportunities for prevention, and evaluate progress in controlling injury requires systematically collected data that can link injury events to information characterizing risk. Identifying the most common and severe injuries is the first task in an injury prevention program. Developing specific strategies to prevent injuries requires an understanding of the underlying determinants of the injury. To accomplish this goal, we are engaging our industry partners and people with expertise in animal agriculture to identify how specific injuries might be prevented, high-impact dissemination, and accelerated implementation of interventions in at-risk populations

In the last year we have continued to examine aggregated data from our pork industry partners and worker compensation carriers. Utilizing data from companies and insurance carriers provides unique opportunities and challenges, but will ultimately offer a more comprehensive picture of injury risks to workers and burden to employers. Through these efforts we are identifying and describing major injury problems and potential causes of these injuries. We continue to focus on needlestick injuries and animal interaction injuries in swine operations and have manuscripts being prepared for each topic. There are some notable findings that we will further explore with our partners.

Needlestick injuries are not frequent, but can result in serious complications. From both company and insurance claims data we note that these injuries can be costly and result in substantial time away from work. Moreover, contrary to some beliefs, there is a considerable risk of injury to workers who are using needleless injection systems. We have limited data comparing these types of injuries, but it appears injuries from needleless systems result in higher average compensation costs and time away from work. The type of medication used may contribute to this difference. Another observation is that workers injured by both needlesticks and through an animal interaction have less experience than those with other types of injuries. Animal interactions are the most common cause of injuries, but may have a wide range of causes. We have directed our efforts toward identifying scenarios where the injuries that do occur may have been prevented with improved animal handling skills. We believe this will guide future development and implementation of tailored in-service animal handling training as a means to reduce injuries and improve the care and welfare of the animals. Our investigation has spearheaded our recent outreach and training efforts with the National Pork Board on sow handling as an important training tool for swine human resource officers and prevention of animal interaction injuries. Finally, through text analytics of the worker compensation data we have identified power-washing related injuries as an area of focus for the coming year.

We continue to recruit both swine and dairy operations. We anticipate that our efforts to understand the reporting of injuries in animal agriculture will also facilitate evaluating efforts to implement any prevention protocols.