CS2 Poisoning

Swaying and trembling, he stood before the judge and told his troubles--a tall, gaunt man, so thin he couldn't sit without a pillow. For 19 years he had worked in the Marcus Hook plant of American Viscose Co., largest rayon manufacturers in the U. S. Three years ago he began to feel sick and dizzy; then "things got kind of smoky." His legs shook, his fingers stiffened into claws, he had "to sit down and slide downstairs," and at night he was yanked out of sleep by terrific spasms of his chest muscles. Finally (Dec. 31, 1937) he left the plant.

This was the story told in Philadelphia last week by John Nichols to Workmen's Compensation Referee John Alessandroni. The hearing climaxed a series of State and medical investigations of carbon disulfide poisoning in the rayon industry, brought to public attention a picture of industrial disease as lurid as the 1936 silicosis and radium poison scandals. Referee Alessandroni decided in favor of John Nichols, but Nichols got no money, for the new Pennsylvania occupational disease law did not go into effect until Jan. 1, 1938--one day after he left his job.

Present at the hearing were famed Philadelphia Toxicologists Max Trumper and Samuel Tobias Gordy, authors of the first comprehensive medical report of carbon disulfide poisoning ever printed in the U. S. Throughout the country, they said, there are 19 rayon companies which use carbon disulfide. Some of them, like Du Pont at Wilmington, Del., take special pains to guard their employes from poisonous C52 fumes. American Viscose Co. cut down the hazard with a new ventilating system designed by Philip Drinker of Harvard. But hundreds of workers throughout the U. S. have been permanently disabled.

Yellowish carbon disulfide, with its radish-like stink, is a man-made chemical used to dissolve fats. In the rayon industry it is poured into huge churns to dissolve cotton or wood pulp before the cellulose solution is spun into threads. From the churns rise foul C52 fumes.

Many of the 1,600 workers in the Viscose plant felt no ill effects from the gas, and some were only mildly sick. But, according to the Pennsylvania survey of 120 "men on the job . . . only five per cent of the persons examined . . . were found to be completely free from pathological signs and symptoms." So strong a solvent is C52 that its fumes, inhaled, destroy the fatty sheaths of nerves, soften the fat matter of the brain. For some people, even a whiff is enough to produce a difficulty in walking. First symptom of poisoning, said Drs. Trumper & Gordy, is a kind of drunkenness, a "C52 jag." Then follow "a rich variety of neurologic disorders" including vertigo, vomiting, loss of muscle control, jumping and twitching, "spider webs" before the eyes. Victims are usually sleepy and tired, but in bed they are tortured by terrifying nightmares, wakened by violent muscular spasms. And finally, "there cannot be any doubt," according to noted Neurophysiologist Fritz Heinrich Lewy of the University of Pennsylvania, "that industrial C52 poisoning leads to insanity."

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