Occupational Infectious Disease—Global Challenges and Local Solutions

Dear Colleagues,

Occupational settings represent critical but often overlooked sites for the emergence, transmission, and control of infectious diseases. Workers in diverse industries—ranging from healthcare and agriculture to mining, manufacturing, and service sectors—face heightened risks of infection shaped by local environments and global patterns of labor mobility. Yet, despite their significance, occupational infectious diseases remain poorly characterized in global health discourse, overshadowed by broader public health concerns and fragmented across disciplines of occupational health, epidemiology, and infectious disease medicine. This special issue of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease seeks to redress this gap by examining the global challenges and locally tailored solutions that define the field.

We ask authors to consider challenges that include surveillance, the globalized nature of labor, and structural barriers such as weak regulatory frameworks, under-resourced occupational health programs, and limited intersectoral coordination. Surveillance systems that can adequately detect, monitor, and report occupational infectious diseases remain underdeveloped in many regions, posing a major challenge to prevention and control. Other barriers include fragmented data collection, limited cross-sectoral coordination, and gaps in awareness among both workers and employers. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers represented a disproportionately high burden of infection worldwide, but gaps in occupational data made it difficult to quantify the full impact or to compare risks across sectors. In many low- and middle-income countries, occupational health is still narrowly defined in terms of physical safety, with infectious risks insufficiently addressed. Even where policies exist, enforcement can be inconsistent, and workers in informal or precarious employment often fall entirely outside regulatory protections. Finally, migration, seasonal work, and international supply chains can spread risks across borders, creating vulnerabilities that transcend local health systems. Agricultural workers exposed to zoonotic pathogens, transportation workers moving between endemic and non-endemic regions, or seafarers operating across multiple jurisdictions all illustrate how occupational exposures contribute to global infectious disease dynamics.

At the same time, promising solutions are emerging that we ask authors to present, evaluate and generalize to other populations or industries. These include workplace policies that embed infection prevention into occupational safety frameworks, industry collaborations that promote shared responsibility for worker health, and innovative public–private partnerships that expand surveillance and response capacity. By examining both global challenges and locally grounded solutions, this special issue of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease aims to bring together research and perspectives that illuminate pathways toward safer working environments and healthier communities.

Dr. Nicola Bulled
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• occupational health
• worker health
• workplace safety
• workplace policy
• occupational exposure