mill fever
English edit
Noun edit
mill fever (plural mill fevers)
- An acute febrile respiratory infection common to textile workers, believed to be a result of gram-negative bacteria in mill dust.
- 1945, Transactions of the Annual Conference of State Sanitary Engineers:
- According to Ritter, the acclimatization is also temporary, and anyone who is absent from his work for longer than 2 to 4 weeks may reexperience mill fever when he returns.
- 2007, Paul D. Blanc, How Everyday Products Make People Sick, →ISBN:
- Mill fever and byssinosis are not the same condition, but they are interrelated. A growing number of research studies over recent years have supported the scientific view that endotoxin and other biologically active substances derived from the cell walls of bacteria and fungi play a pivotal roll in both mill fever and byssinosis. Long-term exposure to contaminated dust at levels too low to cause mill fever acutely may nonetheless be capable of inducing byssinosis. Such factors of exposure level and duration may account for the differences between the two conditions. It is also possible that while endotoxin alone can induce mill fever, other natural constituents in cotton, flax, and certain other fibers cause byssinosis with endotoxin simply being a cofactor or a marker of contamination.
- 2013, Peter Kirby, Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780-1850, →ISBN, page 88:
- It has been suggested that febrile diseases were highly sensitive to standards of personal and domestic hygiene and therefore a decline in reports of mill fevers may also have reflected improvements in the overall cleanliness of mills and workers' homes between the 1780s and 1830s (though there is little evidence that the domestic or sanitary arrangements of mill workers improved significantly over that period).