Re: Girl Scout/Boy Scout Badge

["J. Marshall Reber" <jmarshall.reber@comcast.net>]

Two things disturb me concerning this recent thread:



1) Why have no professional, quantitative reports been cited?  Surely

someone competent to produce an objective evaluation must have been

involved?  Or is this another case similar to the civil authorities

neglecting the engineering advice when they permitted the Golden Gate

Bridge to be greatly over stressed on its fiftieth anniversary with too

many pedestrians (reported recently on a risk analysis list)?



2) Ken Silverstein seemed grossly uninformed when he stated in the audio

interview that radium luminous compound was no longer used because of

the dangers manifested by the demise of many radium girls.  After

telling them to stop pointing their brushes in their mouths they

continued to paint radium dials for decades without any new incidents of

poisoning.  In fact, when I was a grad student in the sixties there were

still some rather old ladies going to Robley Evans' lab at MIT who had

injested radium at skeletal doses of below about 10 Gy who not only

didn't get cancer but who, curiously, seemed to be living longer than

the average population.





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