Occupationally-related disease

Byssinosis

Byssinosis is an occupational disease that primarily affects workers in cotton processing, hemp or flax industries. Other names for byssinosis include “brown lung” disease and mill fever or cotton worker’s lung. Byssinosis causes and asthma-like breathing difficulty, usually at the beginning of the workweek and improves as the workweek progresses or dust exposure stops.

Trade union efforts to combat byssinosis began before the First World War. Byssinosis became an occupational health issue in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries when exposure to cotton dust in the Lancashire cotton industry caused the chronic respiratory disease. The effort to combat byssinosis sustained for 70 years. Byssinosis became a recognized medical condition and a compensatable disease, due to the tireless effort by the trade unions. The trade union campaigned for better dust control, worker compensation, and medical research.

OSHA, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Department of Agriculture, the National Cotton Council, the America Textile Manufacturers Institute, and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees formed the “Task Force for Byssinosis Prevention”. The task force researched the batch kier method of washing cotton that eliminates the risk of byssinosis. In 1999, OSHA attributed the significant reduction in byssinosis cases to the cotton dust standard. Currently, OSHA approved state plans include occupational respiratory disease surveillance NIOSH, a systemic collection, analysis, and dissemination of health hazard data to monitor the extent and severity of occupationally-related lung disease, such as byssinosis.

Reference

Bowden, S., Tweedale, G. (2003). Mondays without Dread: The Trade Union response to byssinosis in the Lancashire Cotton Industry in the twentieth century. Social History of Medicne. Vol 16, Issue 1: 79-95. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/16.1.79

EHS Today. Retrieved on April 2, 2018 from http://www.ehstoday.com/news/ehs_imp_33930