`Radium girls' saved workers in nuclear industries
IT WAS reported by The Waterbury Connecticut Republican American newspaper that Ms Mae Keane, the last surviving `radium girl' celebrated her 100th birthday on May 28 this year.
A closer scrutiny of records showed that she is only one of the surviving `radium girls.'
Disfigurement, death
During 1919-27, the Waterbury Clock Co. employed young girls to paint dials of watches with radium-containing paint. Dial painting factories sprang up in many cities such as New Jersey, Ottawa.
A few hundred grams of radium caused over a hundred deaths among these workers. Several workers suffered disfigurement. The study of radium girls which formed the basis to prescribe radiation protection standards for radio-nuclides such as plutonium saved the lives of nuclear workers.
The numbers on the watches were tiny. The company chose young girls as they had steady hands and small fingers.
The girls swallowed large amounts of radium as they sharpened the brushes more often with their lips to paint the dials faster. At eight US cents a dial, the pay was good.
Job lost, life saved
Mae Keane did not `lip paint,' as the paint tasted bitter. The company fired her because of low productivity. She was lucky. Loss of job saved her life. She worked for about two months, long enough to loose her teeth!
When the dial painters blew their noses, their hand-kerchiefs glowed in the darkCurrently no one uses radium to make luminous compounds.
In 1927, Eben Byers a well-known millionaire injured his arm during a train journey. To cure his condition, he drank 1400 bottles of `Radiothor' (each bottle containing one micro curie each of Radium-226 and Radium-228) which William Bailey, a quack, promoted as an elixir of life.
Schubert and Lapp in their eminently readable book titled "Radiation, what it is and how it affects you" quote thus from the journal Radium (1916): "Radium has absolutely no toxic effects, it being accepted as harmoniously by the human system as is sunlight by the plant".
No wonder physicians prescribed radium for acne, hypertension. sexual impotence, ulcers, gouts, diabetes and the like. Nobody knew about the risks from radium.
Byers' body decomposed due to the massive amounts of radium.
He died in 1932. Careless dial painters suffered grievously. Their teeth fell out and bones turned brittle. Some suffered spontaneous fractures. In Waterbury alone fifteen painters died during the 1920s and 30s.
The Center for Human Radiobiology at the Argonne National Laboratory identified 6675 people containing radium; among them, 3161 were dial painters.
They studied 1575 of them. Hundred and twelve dial painters died due to radium-induced cancers. Scientists had decade long observations of 27 persons who were internally exposed to radium.
They had measured the radium content in their body accurately. They observed that the body has to retain one microgram of radium to produce harmful effects.
Tolerance level
After considering a safety factor of ten, Robley Evans, an eminent MIT Professor, proposed a tolerance level of 0.1microgramme for radium. This served as the cornerstone to prescribe radiation protection standards for radio-nuclides such as plutonium.
Specialists suggested a working lifetime limit of five micrograms (0.3 micro curie) for plutonium, as the alpha particle emission from 5 micrograms of plutonium would deposit energy at the same rate as 0.1 microgram of radium. Curie is a unit of radioactivity; the activity of one gram of radium is one Curie.
But as animal studies showed that plutonium is more toxic, they reduced the plutonium limit by five to 0.06 micro curie. Since the nuclear industry enforced this standard, not even a single worker died due to internal contamination from plutonium.
K. S. PARTHASARATHY
Former Secretary , AERB, Mumbai
(ksparth@yahoo.co.uk)
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