Document 71k5kdpeY6nRJ0b0aMrZoXKzR

104 CHAPTER 4 years, 40 percent of all workers in a Griesheimer chemical plant (where chromium sulfate and other industrial chemicals were pro duced) had developed lung cancer. The author predicted that "every important chromate factory in Germany will have lung cancers among its workers."115 Arsenic inhalation was a much older concern. In 1822 John A. Paris, a fellow of the Royal Society of London and a senior physi cian at Westminster Hospital, had reported skin cancers among Welsh and Cornish workers exposed to arsenic fumes in copper smelters and tin foundries. Animals were also said to have been affected--horses and cows in the region were seen crawling on their knees in pain from tumors.116 People treated with potassium arsenite for psoriasis were found to have a higher-than-average risk of skin cancer in the 1870s, and communities where people drank arsenic-contaminated water were said to have aboveaverage cancer rates.117 In the 1920s, concerns about poisoning arose when arsenic-based pesticides began to be sprayed onto vineyards to combat insect pests. Aerial spraying began shortly after the First World War, prompted not just by the wartime improvement of biplanes but also by growing recognition that some of the newer varieties of vines were especially vulnerable to pests. By 1929, Germany was producing 1,500 tons of arsenic, most of which was misted onto vineyards. German wine production grew by 60 percent from 1929 to 1938, the large part of which was attributed to the rising use of arsenic pesticides.118 Poisonings were also increasingly common. The pesticide showed up in both wine and grape juice, but also in the dusts churned up when treated fields were plowed.119 Chronic arsenic poisoning had been recognized as an occupa tional disease prior even to the First World War; the affliction-- especially among glass- and steelworkers--was one of the first oc cupational ailments requiring official notification, along with poi soning by lead, mercury, and phosphorus.120 Arsenic poisoning was recognized as an occupational disease in Germany's Occupa tional Disease Ordinance (Berufskrankheitenverordnung) of 1925, along with eight other classes of poisonings warranting govern mental compensation (lead, phosphorus, mercury, benzene, aro OCCUPATIONAL CARCINOGENESIS 105 matic nitro compounds, carbon disulfide. X-rays and radioactive substances, and carcinogens such as paraffin, tar, anthracene, and pitch that primarily affect the skin).121 Workers in the glass and steel industries were the best-known early sufferers from arsenic poisoning, but vineyard exposures were increasingly serious. Ernst W. Baader in 1929 called for the chemical industry to find a substitute for its use as a pesticide, and in 1937 argued that even in very low doses it could cause cancer (he also claimed that can cer was more common around factories releasing arsenic into the environment). Karl Reinhart in 1943 surveyed the situation, noting that by 1940 there were 589 verified cases of arsenic poisonings among vintners, including several cancers.122 The problem began to soften somewhat in 1940, when insecticides such as pyrethrum and chrysanthol were introduced, replacing arsenic (nicotine sprays were also encouraged).123 The Nazi party Chancellery banned the use of arsenic pesticides in February of 1942, allowing vintners to use up their stocks by June 30, 1942.124 Vintners had earlier been barred from applying compounds containing lead. Arsenic pesticides were still allowed on nongrape crops such as strawberries and tomatoes, but strict precautions specified when and how workers might spray, what they were to wear, and so forth.125 German industrial hygienists generally recognized that while exposure to any dust was harmful, the worst in terms of the num bers of people affected was probably quartz or silica dust. Silico sis--the German is Quarzstaublunge, literally "quartz dust lung"-- was regarded as the king of occupational lung disease, killing more, it was said (and perhaps rightly so) than all other dusts com bined. Hundreds of scientific articles on the topic can be found in the German medical literature of the 1930s, describing every thing from the maximally hazardous particle size to a possible can cer link.126 Silicosis was a hazard wherever one inhaled quartz dust, but especially in iron foundry work (sand was used to make the molds for casting liquid pig iron), in work with quartz-based scouring powders (Comet Cleanser contains abrasive quartz), in porcelain or brick manufacture, in mining and sandblasting, and in other work involving exposure to sand or rock dust. The