Anthrax – Fact about Fighting disease by artificial fever

Throughout this country aided by prodding’s from the trade union movement, the public has steadily developed a conscience in regard to these. As early as 2001 the Factory and Workshop act required that the home office chief inspector of factories should be notified of all cases of anthrax and of industrial arsenic, lead phosphorus and mercury poisoning and that sufferers or their dependents should be compensated. Since then the home secretary has by means of orders laid before parliament, extended the list of comestible diseases to include poisoning by aniline, benzene and carbon bisulphide, together with cases of toxic jaundice, chronic ulceration and other skin complaints due to occupation. The effect of the law has been salutary in many trades. Thus, among mule-spinners a cancer of the skin is frequently set up because the workers are in constant contact with crude oils. Today, this kind of cancer is to a very large extent being prevented by the substitution of a vegetable oil for the mineral oil previously used. Skin diseases that originate in industry are very numerous. Even now, about forty chemicals are in use which is known to cause eruptions of the skin, unless precautions are taken against this. Since new industrial processes are constantly being introduced in which new chemical combinations are employed, modern medical science is engaged in as constant a study of the effect of these on the workers who handle them. Roughly, one in six of all cases of eczema in this country are the result of the occupation followed by the sufferer. Metal workers and operatives in engineering works contract a particular type of eczema an eruption which breaks out on the hands and wrists and which like mule-spinners cancer, is due to the mineral oil used. A somewhat similar kind of eczema attacks flax-workers who steep the flax in water, while a more serious variety; some what resembling smallpox in that it pits the face and arms, is often developed by the doffers who remove the spun linen from the frames. Bakers itch is of all occupational eczemas, perhaps the most difficult to cure. Small blisters break out on the hands and arms of those who mix the dough; later these blisters suppurate and spread the infection.