Mike,

I have a young lady in the same boat, but her employer is doing nothing 
about it although the following device has been recommended. She resorted 
to embedding so the paraffin amount is just enough to not create this 
problem - a tedious way to do it, but it does work - however others 
embedding are not so careful.

Go to Thermo Electron and look for their heated paraffin trimmer with 
slanted, heated surface and paraffin capture tray. (ParaTrimmer, not sure 
of the name)  - it is a bit pricey, but well worth the money and I would 
perosnally love to have one in our lab.

You employee's problem may stem from more than just scraping blocks, and 
you need to look at other ergonomics involved with her microtomy, embedding 
,etc etc.  Does she operate the  microtome in an ergonomic manner, have an 
ergonomic chair, decent setup for reach, forceps that help her out, all 
those good things.  Also what she does outside the lab may be a factor as 
the young lady here does some other physical activities (lots of cell phone 
dialing is one using her thumb to punch in the numbers) that contributes to 
her problems in the lab. Hopefully Jan Minshew, an expert on ergonomics in 
the histology laboratory can help you here too.

At 10:30 PM 1/19/2006, you wrote:
>Hi to all of those out in Histoland...
>
>I was hoping to get some help.  I have an employee who is suffering from 
>tendonitis, and she feels that scraping blocks before trimming is adding 
>to her injury.  I know that there is some sort of device "out there" that 
>uses heat to melt the excess wax from the outside of the block so that it 
>will fit into the microtome chuck.  Does anyone know of a type of heat 
>block or hot knife that could accomplish this?  I am looking for something 
>that will collect the melted wax so that we don't have a huge mess to 
>clean up after a day's work.
>
>Thanks for your time,
>
>Mike Cupello.
>_______________________________________________
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>Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu
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Gayle Callis
Research Histopathology Supervisor
Veterinary Molecular Biology
Montana State University - Bozeman
PO Box 173610
Bozeman MT 59717-3610
406 994-6367
406 994-4303 (FAX)



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