When it comes to snow, human nature seems to be either to play in it or move it out of the way. Snow play has plenty of hazards, from slush balls to the perils of downhill slopes — winter sports are estimated to injure about a half million of us each year.
But that nasty chore of shoveling, scraping or blowing snow and ice is nearly as dangerous to our health and more onerous because it’s almost always an involuntary activity.
A study published in mid-January in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine concluded that there were an average of 11,500 snow-shoveling injuries and related medical emergencies each year from 1990 through 2006.
The toll is even larger when all types of “manual snow and ice removal tools” are lumped together, as they have been recently in the same national network of hospital emergency departments reporting injuries to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The most recent estimates from 2009 suggest there were more 26,000 injuries from shovels, ice breakers, scrapers and similar implements.
There’s little doubt that snow shoveling can kill. Published studies based on death certificates and weather records in Massachusetts and Michigan have showed that heart disease deaths generally and deaths from exertion-related cardiac arrest specifically rise by 22 percent or more in the weeks during and after a heavy snow.
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article courtesy of Newsnet5.com
