Hi
This may be of use? Taken from
http://occmed.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/53/6/414.pdf
Regards
Sue
"MYTHS AND MOTHS IN THE WORKPLACE
London buses are the only things that I know that reliably go round in
threes. And the
hoof beats you hear outside your window are usually horses not zebras. So
it was with rather
more than my usual cynicism that I regarded the three ladies standing in
front of me that
afternoon.
I was doing a routine clinic at an old fashioned factory, where generations
of the same
family had worked and where manual handling standards were something
thatMoses might
bring down from the mountain in the future. All three had the same
complaint and the same
physical signs.They had sore arms,with redness on the lateral and extensor
aspects from the
knuckles to half way up the upper arm, the right more than the left. They
were adamant that
they were being bitten by a plague of fleas. When I enquired where the
fleas were coming
from, they said that they were cardboard fleas which were hatching from the
cardboard
mites that infested batches of cardboard boxes, especially in summer.
Intrigued, I went with
them to their production line and followed their activities as they rotated
through different
parts of the line.
The penny finally dropped. They were not bites, they were abrasions.These
were acquired
by the way they opened out, and then assembled, the flat pack, cardboard
boxes in which
they placed the completed product. The ladies were all right handed, so the
right armtended
to be the one that they put into the box first, abrading the outer aspect
of the arm against the
protruding cardboard flap of the top of the box. It happened mainly in
summer because that
was when they wore short-sleeved blouses. And although the rash has gone,
they are now
complaining about the extra heat load of wearing long-sleeved blouses in
summer.
Some weeks later, I was sitting in with an eminent dermatologist in a
clinic. I told him this
story. He said that he had spent an entire morning at a chocolate factory
with patients with
the same problem—except that there, they were complaining of being bitten
by chocolate
moths."
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