A WOMAN has been taken to hospital last night after she was thrown from a quad bike and impaled through the neck on a metal pole.

A WOMAN was impaled through her neck on a metal spike after falling off a quad bike.

The 24-year-old victim was riding the bike at Elms Farm in Depden when she came off the vehicle and landed on a metal pole which was part of a fence at 3.25pm yesterday.

Paramedics arrived at the scene to find the woman conscious and breathing but not alert.

A spokesman for the East of England Ambulance Service said: “The patient was riding a quad bike, came off the bike and landed on a metal spike which formed part of a fence. The spike went through her neck.”

An equestrian centre, M F Read and Sons and a bed and breakfast, operate out of Elms Farm.

Fire crews from Bury St Edmunds and Wickhambrook were also called to the incident but the injured woman had been released from the fence before they arrived. They found the spike had penetrated the woman’s neck.

The victim was taken to West Suffolk Hospital with a penetrating injury to her neck by land ambulance. Her condition was not known last night. No-one could be contacted from the farm last night.

Comedian Rik Mayall was left in a coma for five days when he was trapped under his quad bike following an accident at his home in Devon in 1998. He was airlifted to Plymouth’s Derriford hospital with two haematomas and a fractured skull.

And Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne broke his neck, eight ribs and a vertebra when he had an accident while riding a quad bike at his Buckinghamshire home in 2003.

Around 1,000 people are seriously injured on all-terrain vehicles every year, with an average of two deaths every year.