Health risks for workers from occupational exposure to radon and electromagnetic radiation

Occupational medicine is branch of science, which deals with the health of people at their workplace. Occupational medicine focuses on ensuring and monitoring healthy and safety wellbeing of employees. As of today, working conditions and environment of clinicians are well studied, at the same time, working conditions in the physiotherapeutic and diagnostic departments are insufficiently studied. The paper presents results of examination of safety of workers carrying out radon and physiotherapeutic procedures with electromagnetic radiation. For the study equivalent equilibrium volume activity of radon and its progenies in the air of the physiotherapeutic room, radon volume activity in the water, ambient dose equivalent rate for gamma-rays and levels of electromagnetic radiation in working areas were measured. Examination of working conditions and environment and evaluation of potential occupational health risks for workers of physiotherapeutic facilities demonstrated that annual individual effective doses from short-lived progenies received by the workers varied from 3.7 mSv to 8.6 mSv (with a standard of 20 mSv/year for group A). Potential occupational risk of meningioma was acceptable for the workers carried out physiotherapeutic procedures with microwave radiation in majority of working rooms. In two rooms electric field exposure was 6.33 V/m and 11.9 V/m (with a standard of 25 V/m). Working conditions in diagnostic laboratory are within the norm levels.