Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 25, 1990 TAG: 9006230205
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He doesn't like it a bit.
Not far away, Roger Tankersley spends his days confined in the cab of a Benati excavator, which he uses to break up the concrete from what used to be the western leg of the Hunter Viaduct.
The sweat doesn't start to roll off him for maybe an hour after he fires up his machine. But then it's constant. Not that he's complaining.
"You've got to make a living some way, and if it takes sweating to do it, that's what you do," he says. He has had worse jobs, most recently as heavy equipment operator at the notorious Kim-Stan landfill in Alleghany County.
These men are two of the more conspicuous examples of Roanoke's sweaters in their noble form, perhaps best described by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in "The Village Blacksmith":
His brow is wet with honest sweat, he earns whate'er he can
And looks the whole world in the face, for he owes not any man.
In the office buildings that border their work site, sweat of a different, less admired type may be seeping through employees' pores. One writer who dubbed it "psycho-sweat," said it "oozes out of the dark wells of anxiety" and is caused by guilt, depression, bad news and worse, including tense meetings with one's boss.
Honest sweat is our friend. Psycho-sweat is our foe.
Honest sweat doesn't stink - unless you let it stick around a while. Psycho-sweat mingles with bacteria to produce Body Odor, a.k.a. B.O., the purely natural and abhorrent condition that helps support a $1.5 billion underarm deodorant and antiperspirant industry in the 3 1 SWEAT Sweat United States.
Honest sweat comes from the eccrine glands, of which we have from 2 million to 5 million apiece, all over our bodies, save for our lips and genitals.
Psycho-sweat comes from the apocrine glands, vestigial things that are concentrated in the scalp, underarm and groin areas.
Honest sweat feels good and cools us off. Psycho-sweat does neither.
People go out of their way to produce an honest sweat by running for miles, by playing racquetball on their lunch hours, by weeding their gardens till they begin to feel as earthy as their vegetables.
People go out of their way to avoid psycho-sweat, to no avail.
Whatever its form, sweat is much on everyone's mind these days. After a cool spring, the Roanoke Valley has begun to swelter again from high temperatures and soaring humidity.
Listening to citizens' complaints, hearing your own inner voice gripe about the weather, you begin to agree with Walt Whitman, who wrote:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
That's nice, Walt, but you'd better pick your animals wisely. Dogs don't sweat, but their panting would drive you nuts.
Mice don't sweat. They drool saliva on their chests and paws and rub it over their bodies.
Elephants fill their trunks with water and squirt it over themselves. Please, not in the kitchen.
There are those (notably the French) who think we Americans make too much of sweat - that we shower too often and use too many deodorants in an effort to make ourselves smell sweet.
Some 70 percent of antiperspirant use takes place on our fetid shores, but elsewhere in the world, people spend more on deodorants, according to Mort Barr, director of research for the Mennen Co. in Morristown, N.J.
What's the difference? Antiperspirants inhibit delivery of the sweat to the surface of the skin. Deodorants give off a scent to mask the body odor and fight the skin bacteria that work to produce it.
All antiperspirants are deodorants, but not all deodorants are antiperspirants, Barr says.
In this country, the Big Three in the underarm industry are Procter & Gamble (Secret and Sure), Gillette (Right Guard) and Mennen (Speed Stick), with the last two fighting neck and neck.
"Body odor used to be the way we identified our fellow human beings for mating and all kinds of things," says Dr. Larry Patton, a dermatologist with the Lewis-Gale medical clinic at Valley View.
"We've kind of gotten away from that," he adds. Not that he wants to go back to it.
Years ago, specific body odors were used in diagnosing disease. Diptheria had a sweetish smell, Patton says. Diabetic coma was accompanied by a fruity scent, scurvy smelled putrid, "and typhoid fever patients smelled like freshly baked brown bread."
Nowadays, we identify each other by purchased smells. That's an Aqua Velva man over at that desk. And that woman who just joined us on the elevator? Shalimar.
Sweat itself is purer than you'd think, consisting of 99 percent water, a small amount of sodium chloride, i.e. table salt, and yet smaller amounts of potassium, urea, glucose and such.
Eccrine sweat - the good kind - emerges from the eccrine glands when a rise in the blood temperature is detected by the hypothalamus in the central brain. This excites the autonomic nervous system, which controls the sweat glands. The eccrine glands begin to secrete sweat, removing heat from the body by evaporation.
This is the body's thermo-regulatory system, which keeps us from dying of heat stroke.
Apocrine sweating is a low-level, continual process of dubious merit.
We can do both kinds of sweating at the same time. But sometimes, things go awry.
"Sweat causes a lot of disease states," Patton says. "Some are pretty obscure."
Take hyperhydrosis. It makes people sweat non-stop and gives them the cold, clammy handshake that sticks in your mind long after the sufferer has left your office.
Patton says patients with this disorder have actually dripped pools of water as they sat and waited to see him.
The malady is, in part, an exaggerated anxiety response. A job interview might give you sweaty palms, but these people "just pour out water," Patton says.
He sometimes recommends applying aluminum chloride hexahydrate to the hands and other areas at bedtime, and wearing rubber gloves to help the substance penetrate. That usually inhibits it, though the condition is often chronic.
Or he may recommend a treatment in which electrical current is passed through a pad that stimulates the sweat glands and slows them down.
"This is one of those diseases where therapy is crude," he says.
"When all those methods fail, there may be surgery to remove the sympathetic nerves that supply the area. It's called a modified cervico-thoracic sympathectomy. You cut some nerves in the back that run down to the hands."
Sometimes, as a side effect of the surgery, other areas may sweat more profusely to offset the ones that have been treated.
Then there is bromo-hydrosis, or excessive odor from apocrine sweat, and a related condition in which people think they have bromo-hydrosis, but don't.
"It's an irrational fear that their sweat is offensive to other people," Patton says.
Then there is generalized hyperhydrosis of the hands and feet.
"If somebody has excessive amounts of sweat over their entire body without exertion or being exposed to heat, it can be related to some disease process like hyperthyroidism," Patton says. "A disease state like night sweats is associated with tuberculosis."
Pheochromocytosis, or extensive sweating for no apparent reason, may signify the presence of malignant tumors.
Finally, there is hereditary anhydrotic ectodermal displasia, which keeps you from sweating sufficiently. These people have a good chance of dying from heat exhaustion.
And you thought prickly heat was bad.
Sweat has inspired memorable quotes and colorful phrases.
Here is the Gospel of Luke, describing Jesus in the garden at Gethsemane: "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat were as if it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground."
Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor, told a newspaper interviewer that "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration," and thus provided hope to generations of ambitious parents, frustration to their mediocre children.
Slang synonyms for sweat include grease, steam, lather and muck. The verb form, "to perspire," has these slang synonyms: ooze, seep, sweatspire, percolate, cook and throw off steam.
To think hard is to sweat the brain. To grill somebody is to give them the sweat cure, usually in a confined space or sweatbox.
To work hard is to sweat like a bull. People who are anxious are all in a sweat. You sweat a sail or rope to make it good and tight.
Sweatpads are griddle cakes.
Everyone knows about sweatshops, cold sweats, night sweats and no sweat.
"Sweating for a sugar report" used to be a hip way of waiting for a letter from your girl. "Sweating for the scandal sheet" meant waiting for your pay check.
In Roanoke, some paychecks are earned in the service of sweat. The 280 employees at the Tultex apparel factory in Roanoke produce brightly colored, synthetic-and-cotton sweatsuits at the rate of some 7 million per year.
And some 225 employees at Elizabeth Arden turn out fragrance products and antiperspirants for the U.S. market under such brand names as Chloe, KL, Lagerfeld, Fendi and Fendi Uomo.
Some office workers who produce apocrine sweat all day can barely wait to produce eccrine sweat by jogging, playing tennis or doing yard work when they get home.
People who sweat eccrine sweat on the job rarely spend their leisure time that way.
After hours of pounding concrete, Roger Tankersley is "plumb wore out."
Construction worker Marty Johnson knows exactly how he feels.
"I go home and lie down," he says.
by CNB