The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Ergonomics Laboratory, along with the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah and the Health Science Center at Texas A&M University, were recently awarded a $1.5 million dollar grant by the CDC and NIOSH to study risk factors and causes of low back pain in the workplace.
Over 700 workers in Wisconsin, Utah, Texas and other states are expected to take part in a study that will seek to identify the relationship between job requirements and demands and the incidence of low back pain.
The three-year CDC/NIOSH grant will help fund a study focusing on manufacturing sectors of industry and workers whose jobs require them to make repetitive movements over extended periods of time.
While studies have shown that 80 percent of all workers will at some time face low back pain regardless of ergonomics intervention that attempt to halt the pain, in a September, 2003 article in The Ergonomics ReportTM, renowned ergonomist Stover Snook, Ph.D., CPE, indicated that ergonomics could be employed to limit the pain and make all workers, back pain or not, more productive. Snook’s recommendations concentrate on managing back pain