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http://www.charlotte.com
Anthrax once hit mills in N.C.
In 1956, 6 workers at textile plant contracted disease
Associated Press
RALEIGH -- Anthrax outbreaks were once an occupational hazard in N.C. textile plants.In 1956, six workers were diagnosed with the bacterial infection within days of each other, prompting aggressive action by state and federal health authorities to contain the spores from being released into the air or soil.Hazel Rape of Monroe, then 34, was one of those who contracted the bacterial infection that March while she was working through a bale of dark gray goat hair in the spinning room of Arel Mills in Monroe. The operation blended goat hair with cotton to make the lining fabric of expensive coats.She felt a stinging sensation on the middle finger of her left hand."It wasn't no time after that there was this little tiny blister, like you'd burned yourself," Rape said. "Later, that made a big sore. So I went to the doctor. He said I had knots under my arm, and that was another sign of infection. So he sent me to the hospital and I was quarantined."Within weeks, the mill's employees were among the first civilians to test a then-new anthrax vaccine that led to the strain used today to protect the nation's armed forces.Anthrax spores clung to imported sheep and goat hair used in the making of fabric. It usually infected textile workers on the skin, resulting in a less lethal illness than the inhalation form that killed a Florida man a week ago.The skin form, called cutaneous, is the kind that infected an NBC News employee in New York.Some mill workers also contracted inhalation anthrax. In the early 1970s, four textile workers in New Hampshire died from inhaling the spores that had been shipped on goat hair.Dr. Martin Hines, a Raleigh veterinarian who was the state's epidemiologist during the Arel Mills outbreak, said the 1956 crisis was actually the third at the plant. Arel workers had contracted cutaneous anthrax in 1953 and 1955.Those cases had prompted state health officials and lawmakers to adopt rules to keep contaminated goat hair from entering the state.Dr. Philip Brachman, who still practices in Atlanta, was with the U.S. Public Health Service and was in charge of designing the civilian trials of a penicillin vaccine. He included the Arel Mills employees in the trial because of the threat they faced on the job.Not long after the 1956 outbreak, the Arel mill shut down in Monroe.Hines and Brachman said they've always been amazed the spores never caused widespread outbreaks of inhalation anthrax."The body has magnificent protections," Hines said. "We have hair in our noses, scilla all the way down the trachea, and they are constantly trapping contaminants. I'm certain I inhaled spores. But they had to have been too big to have lodged in the alveola" of the lungs.Hines said textile workers may well have died of inhalation anthrax, but doctors didn't report it because they didn't know what it was. Rape said that when she got out of the hospital, she went for a follow-up visit with her doctor. He told her an Arel mill worker had died of a massive lung infection, and he suspected it was inhalation anthrax."I think we had to be lucky," Rape said. "I see all this with those people today, and it's just awful, ain't it?"
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