Occupational illness due to physiological strain and ergonomic problems in sugar beet manual harvesting

The aim of this pilot study was to determine physiological strain problems in manual sugar beet harvesting in non-industrialized countries with a low level of mechanization. The experimentation was designed to identify the systematic postures and oxygen uptake related to the activity. In many non-mechanized countries such as Poland, Romania and South Africa, sugar cane harvesting and the manual cutting of cane is a very labor‐intensive activity in which workers usually become fatigued in a few hours. The applied methods were the identification of the subjective feeling with a qualitative interview, oxygen consumption by metabolimeter measurements, posture evaluation with the OWAS method and force evaluation using the software Apalys 4.0. Three men set up the experimental group, their anthropometric characteristics varied in age from 23 to 46 years, in body weight from 72±2 kg, in height 1.78±0.05 m, while body fat was of 22.72±2 kg/m(2). The qualitative interview demonstrated that each operator suffered neck and dorsal pain and fatigue while sugarcane harvesting. The portable metabolimeter K4b2 was used to measure oxygen consumption and heartbeat frequency to determine the physiological strain of dynamic work according to UNI EN ISO 8996. The pointed out results were a VO(2) of 200 ±7.9 l O(2)/h, a VCO(2) of 176 ± 101 l O(2)/h, a heart rate of 141±7.6 b/min with a maximum value of 190 ±9.1 b/min. The energetic equivalent and body surface area were respectively of 5.7 W×h/ lO(2) and 1.90 m(2) on average. The average operators’ metabolic rate was very high, 600 W/m(2) showing that manual sugar beet harvesting tasks were energy intensive. Sugar beet harvesting and bunching appertained to class three and four according to OWAS. The output for each task was the force at L5/C1, it was 2633.33 N to insert the fork into the soil, 2900 N to move the sugar beets to the surface and 2600 N to remove the sugar beet by hand to the harvesting place. The NIOSH index was 1.40, 1.43, 1.39.