Cotton fever is a syndrome that is often associated with intravenous drug use, specifically the use of cotton to filter drugs like heroin. The cause of the condition has been established to be the endotoxin shed by the bacteria Enterobacter agglomerans which colonizes cotton plants. A condition very similar to cotton fever was described in the early 1940s among cotton-farm workers. The term cotton fever was coined in 1975 after the syndrome was recognized in intravenous drug users. However, some sources have attributed the symptoms of cotton fever with simple sepsis occasioned by unsafe and unsanitary drug injection practices. This is borne out by the fact cotton fever occurs in equal spread with all injectable drug users, with various filter materials utilized.
Famous quotes containing the word cotton:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)