The effect of oiling the cotton on the airborne contamination in card rooms.

A disabling chest disease characterized by bronchospasm (" byssinosis ") has, for many years, been recognized as affecting the workers in cotton blow rooms and card rooms (Collis, 1909), and has been attributed to inhalation of the airborne dust round the machines. It remains a serious industrial hazard in spite of measures which have been taken to reduce the dust, such as the improvement of ventilation in the mills and the use of vacuum instead of open stripping-brushes on the carding machines. More recently, however, there has been coming into use a method of dust suppression by spraying an oil emulsion on to the cotton at an early stage of processing (Paton, 1948), and the Factory Inspection Department has reported an impression that the health of the card-room operatives has improved in those mills which have introduced " oiling " the cotton. We have therefore taken an opportunity of making quantitative measurements of the airborne material in the card rooms of a group of mills before and after oiling had been installed. Any improvement in atmospheric cleanliness due to oiling the cotton must, of course, be considered in relation to its possible disadvantages. These may be classed under three headings: (I) difficulties of maintenance of the oiling equipment, (2) interference by the oil with the subsequent processing, and (3) interference with final yarn quality. If the oiling equipment is properly designed and operated none of these factors should prove so serious as to prohibit the use of oiling, but a full discussion of this is outside the scope of the present paper. The dust load in the air of a card room includes at least four distinguishable components: (1) short pieces of broken fibre, known collectively as " fly ", which is responsible for the major part of the visible cloud of dust; (2) fine dust particles from, say, 10, down to submicroscopic sizes, probably derived mainly from the dried plant tissue debris or "trash" which passes through the machines with the cotton (Fig. 1); (3) bacteria, which are mainly soil and water organisms from the cotton fields and are present in extraordinarily large numbers in the card-room air; and (4) fungal spores and hyphae of which numbers are large, but in no way comparable with those of the bacteria.