Byssinosis

Disease of the respiratory tract caused by cotton dust

When byssinosis (also cotton fever, Monday fever, cough Weber or English. Farmer's lung), is a disease of the lungs as a result of long-term inhalation of cotton, hemp or flat dusts. It belongs to the so-called pneumoconiosis (dust lung ). The disease is recognized in Germany as an occupational disease ( BK4202 ).

Properties

Are particularly at risk (eg Panting the raw fibers ) associated with chronic exposure workers who work in the production of bast fibers and textiles from raw cotton, raw flax or raw hemp.

Natural cellulosic fibers and their dust can not be removed from mammals because of the glycosidic bond of the type β1 → 4 because they lack the necessary cellulases. Dusts less than ten microns in diameter are respirable. Depending on the cleaning process also occur different amounts of remaining plant and bacterial antigens from the starting material, which can produce an immune response. Frequent inhalation of dust from cellulose-based natural fibers can lead to bioaccumulation in the lungs. The proportions of the two causes in the development of byssinosis are not yet fully understood.

Symptoms of byssinosis are shortness of breath, cough, and occasionally sputum and nonspecific constitutional symptoms, typically as part of a Monday symptomatology. The disease is divided into three stages, where there is sometimes irreversible secondary changes in the lungs ( centrilobular emphysema) and heart stage III.

Literary Reception of the term

In the novel North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell from 1854, the figure Bessy Higgins dies of byssinosis.