HEALTH CAMPS
 
 
  BACKGROUND
  Healthy workers form the backbone of a healthy economy. As per ILO, the unorganized sector workers contribute nearly 45% of the national income. They toil for 10-12 hours a day without the luxury of weekend holidays. They number around 100 million in the non- agriculture enterprises out of which female workers constitute about 20%. Out of these, as per NSSO data, about 41 million are in the manufacturing sector, 37 million in services and trade and 17 million in construction.
   
  Most workers are contractual, ignorant of poor working and living environment and occupational safety, the number of working hours in a week adding between 70 to 84, and erratic power supply often resulting in working at odd hours. Most of the work related health problems result from poor posture, problems of respiration and vision. Among infectious diseases, Tuberculosis is the single largest killer of young people in the world accounting for nearly two million deaths a year. About a third of the world’s population harbors the infection; this large pool of infected people means that TB will continue to be a major health problem in the foreseeable future. The estimated number of TB cases in India is about 15 million out of which 3.5 million are infectious and each year 2.2 million new cases are added. The workers in this sector are particularly susceptible to Tuberculosis due to lack of basic hygiene and unhealthy living conditions and hardly any access to basic healthcare.
 
   
  The employment of the poor is, by and large, to the informal unorganized sector, making it difficult to organize any risk pooling arrangements; like health insurance. They are the subject of most regressive method of health finance-fee for service paid as out of pocket expenses - a major factor in perpetuation and aggravation of poverty. A recent WB study concludes that out of pocket medical expenses (estimated to be more than 80% of the total medical expenditure) may push 2.2% of the population below poverty line.
 
   
  While these workers suffer a higher burden of disease, their poor utilization of medical facilities is clearly due to lack of access and financial constraints. So its not possible to make an impact on the health status of the population in a poor country without addressing the area and the populace where most of the disease burden exists. These groups have almost double the exposure to lifestyle risk factors like tobacco use and smoking. They are also concentrated in areas having very weak infrastructure, lack of access to safe drinking water, degraded environment, poor sanitation, which combined with under-nutrition and poor hygiene makes them highly vulnerable to ill health.
 
   
  The contagious nature and widespread prevalence of Tuberculosis puts each one of us at the risk of contracting it. Although it is practically associated with poverty no one is totally immune from the risk of contracting it. An improperly treated patient can infect at least ten healthy people in a year. India has a fifth of world’s TB patients. An epidemic of this nature can’t be ignored. Even those who’ve been successfully cured of the disease have been shown to have the possibility of becoming infected again and subsequently ill with a recurrent episode. In the past 3 decades, HIV has hastened the pace of TB spread. We also face the nightmare of TB becoming impossible to cure in the near future due to inappropriate and insufficient use of recommended drug therapy resulting in drug resistant strains of mycobacteriae.
 
   
  The key requirement to successful improvement in global health and especially the workers who carry the maximum burden of ill health is to have a comprehensive view and concentrate on them to have every patient identified, diagnosed and successfully treated.