Hope for Silicotics

Silicosis, the lung disease that miners get from prolonged exposure to quartz dust, has been as final for its victims as an amputation.

But in 1937, after five years of research, J. J. Denny, Drs. Wilmot Douglas Robson and Dudley Arthur Irwin, working for Ontario's Mclntyre-Porcupine (gold) Mines, found a strange treatment which worked on guinea pigs: fine aluminum dust. When inhaled, aluminum dust forms a jelly around the silica particles, making them harmless.

Last spring silicotics (there are about 110,000 in the U.S.) heard their first good news since mining began in the Stone Age--aluminum dust works on people, too. The Wall Street Journal last fortnight summarized two successful trials of aluminum dust on miners. In the Ontario gold mines, 34 silicotics breathed the dust for half an hour six days a week. After 200 to 300 treatments, 56% were improved, none were worse. At the same time 65% of an untreated group got worse. Dr. John William Guy Hannon of Washington, Pa. tried the dust on 176 silicotics in the ceramics, steel and glass industries, improved 168 of them. Famed Pathologist Leroy Gardner of Saranac Lake, N.Y. has also tried out aluminum (and other dusts) on silicotic guinea pigs, watched the successful results by X-ray and microscope.

Its advocates believe that aluminum dust may banish shortness of breath, chest constriction, the threat of tuberculosis. (Said one Canadian miner: "Aluminum takes the leather out of your lungs.") They also think that aluminum breathed after each day's mining or dusted into mines may prevent silicosis altogether. But the day of its general adoption is still a long way off. As research on the subject is not yet complete, Mclntyre Research, Ltd. (the original discoverers) has patented its use of the dust, will apply the royalties to further study.

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