RE: another intentional misuse

[Franz Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 07:48 29.02.2000 -0600, you wrote:
>
>An interesting statistic is that in every case, there was a foreign 
>national involved. In some of the cases there was a "romantic" 
>overtone. In another, self-inflicted (most recent). So, what does one 
>do? No foreign students? Ludicrous. Baby-sitting police force? 
>Ludicrous. Stop research? Ludicrous. Anyone think of requiring 
>psychological testing (MMPI) as they do in power reactors?. 
>Perhaps ludicrous as well, but worth consideration.

Thinking of my time as a chemistry student, I can tell you that we had
access and had to work with a large number of very poisonous and hazardous
chemicals - cyanides, solid sodium and potassium, large volumes of highly
inflammable solvents. Retrospectivle seen one of the most hazardous work,
was removing traces of water from diethylether by cooking it with sodium
tread, which first had to be manufactured by pressing the solid sodium
through a special device. I remember visiting two times hospital because of
two compounds which acted as a very effective tear-gas - though I was
always very cautious and also took all precautions. I remember one
explosion of my distilling apparatus in front of me, several other
explosions at other places - though we were very careful with out work. I
remember one collegue committing suicide at home with sodium cyanide -
there was never written anything about it in the papers. I remember other
true stories of students who died because of severe burns after an
explosion and one person removing the black silver on an arm by complexing
it with sodium cyanide - she had not heard about skin uptake of chemicals
and she died.

Compared with risks and accidents which can happen in spite of being
extremely cautious: What is this P-32 and S-35 accident? As there was no
possibility to hinder the collegue of mine, not to swallow the potassium
cyanide, there is no possibility to hinder anybody smearing P-32, S-35 or
whatsoever into the hair or on the face. Much in contrast to the cyanide
these radionuclides do not cause death and as I understood the activities
were so low, that they did not even had any negative health effects. 


Can anybody tell me, why any "radiation" or "radioactivity" is so
attractive for the mass media? Don't you think that sometimes "collegues"
might be very eager to put such things to the mass media? I had about two
years ago a case of a Sr-90 contamination of a person working in my lab and
up to now I do not know, how it could happen, the only thing I know is,
that it cannot have happened in my lab, because we did not have Sr-90 in
such concentrations as it was found. We never put it to the mass media. 

Is it probably so in the USA that any contamination has to be reported to
some agency and from there it is made public?

Franz


Franz Schoenhofer
Habicherg. 31/7
A-1160 Vienna
Austria
Tel.: +43-1-495 53 08
Fax.: same number
mobile phone: +43-664-338 0 333
e-mail: schoenho@via.at


Office:
Hofrat Dr. Franz Schoenhofer
Bundeskanzleramt (Federal Chancellery), VI/8
Radetzkystr. 2
A-1031 Vienna
AUSTRIA

phone: -43-1-71172-4458
fax: -43-1-7122331

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