Cotton industry

Email this page to a friend

Want news about Cotton industry and more e-mailed to you? Click here for free email alerts

How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace Paul D. Blanc, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

From the standpoint of textile workers' health, however, carding mechanization has dominated all of the other technological changes in the cotton industry, leaving a grim legacy of disease and disability. The process of mechanical carding generates great quantities of cotton dust—fine, penetrating fiber fragments that float in the air and settle on every surface, including the membranes of the airways. The dust is taken in with every breath. Mill fever is one potential complication of inhaling cotton dust.

Like Manchester, Leeds was also a northern textile-manufacturing city, but a center of the wool rather than the cotton industry. Thackrah's book was an immediate success. He quickly prepared an expanded second edition, which appeared in 1832. Thackrah based most of his descriptions on firsthand observation, limiting his citations as much as possible to data derived from direct personal informants father than from published texts.

Eventually, yet another generation after Arlidge, attention began to turn again to the British cotton industry. First in 1910 and then again in 1911 and 1912, sporadic outbreaks of a troubling "new" illness began to occur in a number of different English textile mills. The symptoms were similar in all cases, with an onset at work of chest tightness followed by cough, progressing by nighttime to an asthmalike attack of breathing difficulty accompanied by aches, fever, and chills.

The reports belatedly represented the first official British governmental acceptance of a specific entity of dust-caused disease in the cotton industry. belated mill fever in the united states The United States lagged behind Great Britain, following a century-long tradition of claiming that laborers in American textile mills were virtually disease free insofar as dust was concerned. As early as 1833, as part of a lengthy overview entitled "Influence of Occupation on Health," which appeared in twelve published parts over six months in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Dr. E. G.

Food Plants of the World: An illustrated guide Ben-Erik van Wyk See book keywords and concepts

Cotton oil is a modern innovation (a by-product of the cotton industry). Parts used Seed oil. Cultivation & harvesting Modern cultivars of all four species are grown from seed as annuals, but Upland cotton has become predominant. The industry is highly mechanised but in some regions, harvesting and processing are still done by hand. Oil is obtained by solvent extraction after removal of the seed hairs by a process known as ginning. Uses & properties Crude cotton oil is dark brown and unsuitable for use as edible oil unless refined.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

The conventional cotton industry is the number-one user of pesticides of any agricultural-crop industry in the world. This heavy-duty toxic enterprise is not only polluting water, depleting soil, and contaminating neighboring farms, it's also leaching toxins into its by-products (like cottonseed oil, which we eat) and contributing to illness and disease among farmers who cultivate and harvest the fields. "The fabric of our lives" campaign is one example of how branding can paint a wash over the true behaviors of an industry.

Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind Henry Hobhouse See book keywords and concepts

When, after the abolition of the slave trade in the United States, the nineteenth-century cotton industry found itself short of workers, and slaves were energetically encouraged to breed, the slave population, with minimum imports, increased by nine times in sixty years—nearly twice the free rate. This was despite a shorter expectation of life for slaves than for free women. Depression among slaves on sugar estates lowered their animal spirits. Subjugated people have a low conception rate, and there was in any case an imbalance between genders, with males outnumbering females.

Over a twenty-year period between 1770 and 1790 most of the features of the modem cotton industry were established.10 The earlier developments of the 1730s and 1740s are intriguing because of the close involvement of Dr. Johnson and his friends. The key figure is one Lewis Paul, probably the son of a Huguenot refugee who had settled in Spitalfields, the silk-weaving area of London. Paul was a wild young man who wasted his youth in riotous living, after which he became an apprentice to a maker of graveclothes.

All this led to the logic of Lancashire, and no other area of England was as suitable for the development of the cotton industry, dampness or no dampness. In any case, nearly all watermills were inevitably damp because of the river whose power they used.13 Within rwo generations a cotton worker had become required to work shifts, often at night, and he was frequently obliged to live in a company-owned "back-to-back" without sanitation, garden, or fresh air.

If the period 1784-1861 saw an eightfold increase in the numbers of black slaves in America, it also saw an increase in the misery of the Brirish cotton industry. The "free" pieceworker, of whom there were perhaps 250,000 in 1784, disappeared; in the process Lancashire became unskilled at work and brutalized in living conditions.

In the parallel New England operation in the nineteenth century, only about a quarter the size of the British cotton industry, working conditions were never as bad as in Old England, because an operative in the United States indirectly benefited from the frontier. Though he might not be able to afford to join a wagon train himself, and it required considerable resources to farm anywhere in the United States, the tenant farmer was not forced into industry as in England.

There was no political support from the majority of the European cotton industry. Opinion was divided. Most politicians favored neutrality. English cotton bosses, representing an industry that produced a third of all exports and a tenth of all economic activity, sympathized with the South, and at one time in 1862 recognition of the Confederacy looked possible; Gladstone, the future Liberal Prime Minister, was one of those who supported recognition.

Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol Mary G. Enig See book keywords and concepts

Cottonseed Oil Cottonseed oil is a by-product of the cotton industry. The oil is extracted from the meat of the cottonseed (Gossypiutn hirsutum). Approximately 40 percent of the oil is recovered by screw pressing; the remainder is recovered by various types of solvent extraction. Originally, cottonseed oil was all extracted by the hydraulic press method. About 17 percent of the seed is crude oil. This crude oil is subjected to various forms of ref ining, including bleaching, deodorizing, and/or winterizing.

Hemp Today Ed Rosenthal See book keywords and concepts

In 1903, a historian of the American cotton industry wrote: Cotton harvesting machinery would be of incalculable value, but an efficient machine for picking cotton has yet to be invented. It is a difficult problem for the inventor, because picking cotton is something like gathering raspberries, and even American genius has boggled at it. There have been many fruitless efforts, but I am assured that there is not to-day in the United States a single machine with which any planter would even attempt to pick cotton.

Staying Healthy in a Risky Environment: The New York University Medical Center Family Guide Arthur C. Upton, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

Other occupational lung diseases include occupational asthma and byssinosis, a disease that affects people who work in the cotton industry. Lung cancer also can occur as the result of exposure to known occupational carcinogens. Cigarette smoking, by itself and when combined with occupational carcinogens, can increase a smoker's susceptibility to lung cancer.

Hemp Today Ed Rosenthal See book keywords and concepts

Cotton competed more directly with flax than with hemp, as flax had been used for fine fabric and, "The cotton industry had considerable interest in hemp, since it was manufactured locally into baling cloth, rope and clothing for Negroes."20 But having been displaced by cotton as fabric, flax of coarser grade pursued hemp's non-maritime markets. Until 1872, a duty on imported jute protected flax and hemp. Its repeal was a concession to manufacturing interests that opened the door to a cheaper raw material for bagging and set back the nascent domestic fiber industry.

Staying Healthy in a Risky Environment: The New York University Medical Center Family Guide Arthur C. Upton, M.D. See book keywords and concepts

Steaming cotton before processing may reduce dust. The cotton industry is researching whether this is feasible. • Wear a NIOSH-approved respirator when cleaning dye spills and appropriate protective clothing. Always use an appropriate vacuum or wet cloth—no sweeping. • If you work with potentially hazardous dyes, your company should have a medical surveillance program developed and implemented by a board-certified occupational health physician. In the case of certain dyes, this may include monitoring the urine for early signs of bladder cancer.

FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.

TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalNews.com/np/index.html

This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.

ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.