GANGRENE SCARE

Two-gun Bruce Paton is no longer hitting his 1800 dairy cows with shots from both hands.
The 39-year-old farmer is instead limping around his Mata cowshed after shooting himself in a knee with a copper supplement injected into cattle to improve their health and milk production.
And he is warning other farmers not to treat injected supplements casually as an accidental dose like he received could have led to gangrene and serious consequences.
Mr Paton, who with his wife Julie won the national Sharemilker of the Year contest in 1996, now owns several farms and is rated as one of the top dairy farmers in the region.
He was working at his Kaiwaka runoff last week, leaning over the yard rails injecting Copper-Max with one hand and vitamin B12 with the other, pushing the cows through at 200 an hour.
He didn't think too much of it when a bustling animal bumped him off balance, he dropped the copper injector and it swung down on its plastic hose to spike him near his right knee.
The knee hurt a bit when the job ended so Mr Paton called his doctor, who had no experience with such an injury but advised keeping an eye on the knee and reporting back with any adverse developments.
Mr Paton then called the Waipu Vet Centre, causing veterinarian Stephen McAuley to ring Copper-Max manufacturers Bomac Laboratories in Auckland to find out whether the animal remedy posed health risks for humans.
Mr Paton was at the Ruakaka Primary School, conducting board of trustees interviews of prospective school administration officers and taking painkillers for his increasingly sore knee when Mr McAuley called back to say he needed surgery - and soon.
"I had an operation at Whangarei Hospital at 11.30 that night," Mr Paton said.
The injector had been set up to put 2ml of calcium copper edetate under skin on the lower neck of each cow.
Mr Paton estimated he had received perhaps 0.5ml when the needle jabbed him - far short of the 2g he had heard would be a lethal dose.
Copper livestock supplement can cause severe tissue degeneration - or gangrene - in humans. Surgeons removed flesh around the needle entry point and also cut a hole in the knee to insert a camera and check no copper had penetrated the joint.
Mr Paton spent the night in hospital, but next day returned to farm work too vigorously, tearing the six stitches in his knee.
Yesterday, he was being more careful and ruefully saying being in a rush had been the cause of his problem in the first place.
Bomac official Terry McCathie said most farmers failed to read the fine print on information including a health warning inserted in the packaging for Copper-Max and other products.
There had been two or three previous instances of farmers giving themselves accidental copper injections. Mr McCathie said one of them involved a man who had shot copper into a finger. When the finger was lanced a few hours later a doctor had told him he would have lost it if treatment had been left much longer.
Mr Paton agreed farmers needed to be more careful when handling the injected supplements.
"Look at me - I was in a hurry using two injectors and I was wearing shorts so my legs had no protection."
His staff would now be instructed to use only one injector and to follow the manufacturer's instructions.
In the meantime, Mr Paton planned to stay out of trouble, resting his knee.
"I'll get someone else to copper the cows next time," he said.