Occupational Risk Profiles for Infectious Disease Transmission in the Philippines: A Data-Driven Clustering Analysis

Occupational activities play a critical role in shaping patterns of infectious disease transmission, as work-related contact, exposure duration, and environmental conditions vary substantially across jobs. Evidence from infectious disease outbreaks, including tuberculosis and other respiratory infections, shows that occupations involving frequent close contact and crowded settings face elevated exposure risk, highlighting the need for systematic occupational risk assessment to inform public health action. This study adopts a data-driven approach to characterize occupational risk for infectious disease transmission in the Philippine workforce. Using job-specific indicators such as encounter frequency, work shift duration, and crowd density, unsupervised clustering methods were applied to group occupations into distinct risk profiles. Unlike predefined sector-based classifications, this approach identifies latent groupings that capture shared exposure characteristics and socioeconomic context. The resulting clusters reveal a clear gradient in exposure risk across occupations, with high-risk roles often concentrated among jobs with lower to moderate income levels, while lower-risk occupations tend to be associated with higher income and greater structural capacity for risk mitigation. These findings provide a framework for occupational risk stratification that is directly relevant for public health planning. Overall, this study demonstrates the value of integrating occupational and socioeconomic data to support targeted workplace interventions, risk-informed surveillance, and more equitable allocation of public health resources for infectious disease prevention and control in the Philippine context.