Odour Caused Mass Illness Around a Plant Producing Quartz and Feldspar by Flotation

Abstract

In the last ten years mainly US-investigators have reported a series of mass illnesses occuring at different working places. The authors almost unanimously regarded the outbreaks as being of psychic origin as no substantial cause could be found. The odours which often appeared to be the trigger never indicated poisonous concentrations of substances. A similar case seem to be the complaints about the smell of resin near a quartz- and feldspar-processing plant in the federal province of Upper Austria, we will describe below.