News from the Shenzhen Municipal Occupational Disease Prevention And Treatment Hospital is that occupational related diseases at foreign-oriented medium and small enterprises in Shenzhen have increased dramatically in recent years and this has aroused the attention of concerned government agencies.

According to Director Shi from SMODPTH, there are currently 18000 industrial enterprises in Shenzhen and 12396 of them have high risks of occupational diseases, and 90% of those are foreign-oriented enterprises, involving a total of 310,000 workers.

Shi said that most of the these enterprises are located in Bao'an District and Longgang District and they are mainly engaged in shoe making, hardware plating, rubber and plastic toys making, printing and furniture making. The most frequent source of occupational diseases is organic solvent benzene, Hexyl hydride, and trichloroethylene poisoning.

In Shi's opinion, many enterprises in the city lack awareness of occupational disease prevention and they therefore ask their workers to directly touch these poisonous materials, which is a main factor contributing to the ever increasing rate of these occupational diseases. In order to restrict the disease increase, Shenzhen has set up a three-layer health network that combines municipal, district and street level efforts. Through these efforts, trichloroethylene poisoning in the city already dropped in 2006.

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