ABBOTT008

Topic: Neck/driving at work

Hello,
Over the past 2 years I have suffered in severe pain with my neck and muscle wasting to the left side of my torso. So much so that on the 13th of April 2007 my GP finally sent me to London Harley Street where I seen Mr Sanj Bassi Neurosurgeon. Since then I have undergone 3 neck operations for prolapsed disks in my neck and although the pain is better I am still in pain taking various strong pain killers. The surgeon and my GP have told me that I will not work again and have pointed to the 12hr driving I did in work as the cause of the degeneration of the disks.
I work at Shotton Paper Company on Deeside Industrial Park Flintshire and from when I started in 1999 I was put on a driving job in the waste paper warehouse. For the next 5 years I worked 12hr shifts driving a Volvo 150 front loader with work instruction that I must drive backwards all the time. My consultant in Harley Street is of the opinion that it is this that has seriously contributed to the degeneration of the disks in my neck. The works have tried to combat this by installing cameras in the new trucks to little to late for me, but it is still impossible to drive backwards safely with these cameras. They then took a man off the 3 man team in the waste paper warehouse leaving us with 2 men and adding to the length of time spent on the trucks. They have still not taken any further action to stop further injuries like what I've got and other employees are scared to voice an opinion I was wondering is there any way to get the time spent on these trucks risk assessed by an outside authority like the HSE. The company have been very good in the past at getting around their responsibility for working practices. As I have been told that I wont work again and that the finger of blame is pointing towards the constant driving backwards in the work instruction for long periods. And the constant turning of the neck has degenerated the disks to a point where I'm in constant pain with no prospects after 3 operations of any other pain relief.
Do the HSE have any work directives on driving periods and driving backwards? And can the HSE do a risk assessment on the mentioned job as the works Safety officer has his ways of covering these matters up in house.
Do you think l can claim against the firm
Thank you for your help

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amonialogin

Re: Neck/driving at work

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Consider high blood pressure, a complex disease governed both by genetic and environmental factors. Not only was social classification better than genetic-based ancestry at predicting disease status, it also brought to light a link between a particular gene and blood pressure that was not apparent when only genetic ancestry was considered.

The study, to be published Sept. 9 in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to rigorously combine both socio-cultural and genetic data to simultaneously test the relative contributions of each to racial inequalities in health.

"What's really groundbreaking is that we've got both types of data and they're of equivalent sophistication," said co-author Connie Mulligan, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology and an associate director of the UF Genetics Institute.

The results suggest that previously reported associations between genetic ancestry and health might be accounted for by socio-cultural factors related to race and racism, and not necessarily to genetic differences between races. It also suggests that including socio-cultural factors can strengthen genetics studies and help reveal how social inequalities can lead to biological differences.

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