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Show Among Bothersome Dusts, Silica Said to Be Cause of Disease Known as Silicosis Dust is never a pleasant thing to breathe, but some dusts are far worse than others. Coal dust for example, may color a miner's or coal heaver's lungs as black as night but it rarely does anything more serious, states a writer in the Chicago Tribune. On the other hand, the repeated inhalation of freshlyj ground silica dust (silica is a general gen-eral name for the compound that! makes up sand and quartz), fre-s quently results in a disease known; as silicosis, characterized by an ex tensive scarring and destruction of lung tissue. This disease has come to be recognized rec-ognized as a serious industrial hazard. haz-ard. Since sand and quartz are obviously quite nonpoisonous as found in nature, the fact that they are more dangerous than other dusts when finely ground, led to the suspicion that silicosis was a result re-sult of some hitherto unrecognized property of silica. Tests on rabbits appear to have shown that the danger can be greatly lessened if the silica dust is mixed with a trace of metallic aluminum dust. Silica is a compound of the elements ele-ments of silicon and oxygen, and the atoms of these elements are so arranged ar-ranged on the surface of freshly broken silica that the oxygen atoms sess a small but.definite part qf Uigjumbiiing-pove-cf "fr e. foment fo-ment ' Presumably this Is responsible fo the fact that freshly ground silicca is more soluble than other forms o:s the material. Trris-iaurn suggests tKat the deadly eflect of silica dust is the result of its actually combining com-bining chemically with the lung tissues, and not of mere mechanical irritation. If this were true, the way to denature de-nature silica dust would be to bring it in .contact with something that had a greater affinity for oxygen, so that the latter would be completely saturated before it had time to attack at-tack living tissue. Theoretically, aluminum should have such an effect ef-fect and tests with it have borna out these predictions. |