Anthrax Struck N.C. in 1956 Outbreak-(Textile Plants)

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Anthrax Struck N.C. in 1956 Outbreak

By Associated Press

October 13, 2001, 10:29 PM EDT

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Years before mysterious powders fueled the anthrax anxieties of today, workers in textile plants were exposed to outbreaks from a more natural source: sheep wool and goat hair.

In 1956, six workers at the Arel Mills textile plant near Charlotte were diagnosed with the bacterial infection within days of each other, and became some of the first Americans to test a new anthrax vaccine that led to the strain used today to protect the nation's armed forces.

Hazel Rape, then 34, said she was exposed to anthrax while working in the Arel Mills spinning room of the plant, where she blended goat hair with cotton to make the lining fabric of expensive coats.

"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."

Anthrax spores clung to imported sheep wool and goat hair used at the mill. It usually infected workers on the skin. That form, called cutaneous anthrax, is the kind that infected an NBC News employee in New York.

Cutaneous anthrax results in a less lethal illness than the inhaled form that killed a Florida man earlier this month. In the 1970s, four textile workers in New Hampshire died from inhaling spores in goat hair.

Dr. Martin Hines, a Raleigh veterinarian who was North Carolina's state epidemiologist during the Arel Mills outbreak in 1956, said it was actually the third at the plant. Arel workers also contracted cutaneous anthrax in 1953, within months of the plant opening, and again in 1955.

The cases prompted state health officials and lawmakers to adopt rules to keep contaminated goat hair from entering the state. They also urged the mill's owners to treat the hair before workers handled it.

But efforts to establish national regulations to treat all goat and sheep hides with formaldehyde, which kills the spores, were unsuccessful, Hines said.

"It was considered too expensive," he said.

Dr. Philip S. Brachman, who now practices in Atlanta, was with the U.S. Public Health Service and included the Arel Mills employees in the trial because of the threat they faced on the job.

"The environment in the mills was grossly contaminated," he said. "So they were first to get the vaccine in a natural situation to show it provided protection against developing anthrax."

Mill workers in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire also tested the vaccine, he said.

Not long after the 1956 outbreak, the mill shut down.

Public health officials had worried at the time that the spores would be washed down the drain and into town sewage systems, carried on the shoes and clothing of workers to the farms where many lived. Hines and Brachman said they've always been amazed that the spores never caused a widespread outbreak of inhalation anthrax. Hines said the spores may simply have been too large to infiltrate the lungs.

"The body has magnificent protections," he said. "We have hair in our noses, scilla all the way down the trachea, and they are constantly trapping contaminants."

Copyright © 2001, The Associated Press

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2001


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