Medicine: Zinc Stink

In the dovetailing corners of Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma lie the richest lead and zinc beds in the U. S. There a score of “TriState” towns house 100,000 miners and their families. Typical is Zincville in Ottawa County, Okla. Its battered shacks, pieced together out of tar paper and packing cases, nestle close to glittering mountains of “chat,” or quartz dust, the “offal of the mines.”On blustery days, wind whips and swirls the stinging quartz dust through the streets and into the houses. Constant inhalation of quartz dust causes silicosis.

Two years ago, shocked into action by the silicosis scandal of Gauley Bridge, W. Va.* (TIME, Feb. 3, 1936), the National Committee for People’s Rights (founded by Theodore Dreiser in 1931, supported by contributions from such literati as Louis Adamic, Hamilton Basso, John Chamberlain, Waldo Frank) sent a committee to Tri-State to study the health of the miners. Among the committee members: Economist James Raymond Walsh of Hobart College, Sociologist Esther Lucile Brown of the Russell Sage Foundation, Dr. Adelaide Helen Ross Smith, Manhattan silicosis expert, Socialite Sheldon Dick, Manhattan photographer.

This week in Manhattan the committee issued a dismally illustrated “Preliminary Report.” It was promptly denounced by Secretary Evan Just of the Tri-State Zinc & Lead Ore Producers Association as “damned blackmail.” The report contains no harrowing Gauley Bridge tales of mass burials and walking skeletons. It offers only Government statistics, a short medical treatise on silicosis, eyewitness accounts of Tri-State life. What distinguishes the committee’s report from most of the 50-odd other silicosis reports which have come out in the last 20 years is the fact that it treats silicosis not as a disease of miners alone but as a public-health menace which indirectly lays low the miners’ women & children.

Significant facts:

> The tiny silica or quartz particles which cause silicosis are about 3/25,000 of an inch in size. They irritate the lungs, cause formation of small, stony nodules, which bring about shortness of breath, a dry cough, pain in the chest. Silicosis alone is not serious, painful or disabling. Essentially it is just a case of dirty lungs. But silicotics are extraordinarily susceptible to tuberculosis, frequently die from it. Dust from “chat” piles, according to the Kansas State Board of Health, is a potential menace to all Tri-State inhabitants. Only ways to prevent silicosis in the mines are to wet down the “working faces” and muck piles of zinc, ventilate the mines with fresh air, provide gas masks for the miners. Since the U. S. Bureau of Mines made a special study of the Tri-State sore spot 25 years ago, the report admits, the better mining companies have done much to improve silicosis precautions. But “wetting down,” particularly in smaller mines, is not enforced, and gas masks are too uncomfortable for daily use. In 1927 a “model” silicosis clinic was established at Picher, Okla., but clinic doctors could merely make diagnoses and statistical surveys, offer no treatment for the 5,366 silicosis victims examined up to 1932.

> As important as further dust control, says the report, is prevention of tuberculosis, which spreads like wildfire through the ramshackle huts. “As a result of overcrowded living conditions it is not unusual for a silicotic father, infected with tuberculosis, to share the same room or even the same bed with his children, even though he is continually showering the air with germs when he coughs.” The miners, who are 90% native-born, live in the most abysmal ignorance of the nature of their disease. One tried to check his silicosis by giving up chewing tobacco. Another said: “It’s the likker that gits ’em down. When that alkeehol gits down into the lungs along with the dust that’s what eats ’em out.”

> “The latest . . . figures available for Ottawa County, Oklahoma . . . show that the [mortality] rate for all forms of tuberculosis [in 1930] was then 379.9 per 100,000 for males and 95.8 for females . . . the rate in the United States . . . was 71.8 for males, and 63.0 for females.”

* In 1930 Contractors Rinehart and Dennis of Charlottesville, Va. drilled a tunnel in double-quick time through a hill near Gauley Bridge. Hired for the blasting were 2,000 men, mostly Negroes. Within three years after the tunnel was finished, 466 had died of silicosis and tuberculosis.