Statistical Analysis to Audiometric Evaluation with Internal Collaborators in a Brazilian Sugar and Alcohol Industry

Abstract

Since the Industrial Revolution period, workers have been exposed to noisy work environments that are detrimental to their hearing health. However, in Brazil, mandatory audiometric testing occurred late, and were implemented in the end of 1970s. Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) occurs when there is continuous exposure to loud noise, which causes hearing damage, and it is quite common in industry environments, being, then, the center of this work study: the influence of the working are of a sugar and alcohol industry located in the interior of the State of São Paulo in which the hearing of analyzed employees in a period of one year. I´d been used a sample of twenty-eight employees, half of whom were located in the transportation sector and the other half from machine operators. The analysis was performed, comparatively, in 2017 and 2018, considering frequency analysis between 500 and 8000 Hz. As a result for the right ear, there was a reduction in the percentage of NIHL in the transportation sector from 2017 to 2018, while the left ear remained stable. For the machine operators sector, the relationship was inverse, in which an increase in NIHL value checked for the right ear was obtained, so that the left ear remained constant.