Re: radium dial painters

[Muckerheide <muckerheide@mediaone.net>]

Hi Mike,

As I understood it, 1,000 rad (the threshold), and of course doses in general,
ranging  to >80,000 rad back then, came from measuring the skeletal dose
average, from ashing the bone and mixing, taking the Ra inventory vs the
original bone mass and calculating. Local concentrations/dose in bone vary
enormously in an individual (hot spots). But the total inventory was key when
measuring the radium burden by measuring the radon being exhaled or in body counters.

Evans notes in his "Invited Summary" of the 1981 Conference on Radium in
Wisconsin (in HPJ 1983 Vol 44 Suppl 1, about p512? - don't hold me to that :-)
though there are more formal refs), that the 1000 rad equates to about 50 uCi
"systemic uptake". This was a better basis for recording each individual - it
didn't change every year as the person aged and dose was accumulated :-)  See
especially Bob Rowland's paper in that volume, and Spiers and several others
(including Raabe :-).

Evans also says the radium dial painter data Q should be about 3 rather than
numbers like 10 or 20 (so a person living with 80,000 rad - and counting - was
only at 240,000 rem, not 1,600,000 rem :-). 

The 50 uCi systemic translates to about 250 uCi ingestion based on 20% uptake.
However, since then the elimination rate of radium has been determined to be a
function of initial concentration (higher concentrations eliminated at higher
rates), so dose for the higher exposed group have been fairly substantially
increased in back-calculating the dose from later measurements.

Let me know if you want some data from these and other sources emailed or
faxed if you're interested. (Not the process data unfortunately - I don't have
that at hand).

Regards, Jim Muckerheide
Radiation, Science, and Health
muckerheide@mediaone.net
==============================

> Dear RadSafers
> 
> how much dose did the radium dial painters receive (circa 1925)? I
> know
> this isn't a simple question. I have a graph attributed to J. Newell
> Stannard which indicates that for cumulative doses  of "1,000" or
> less,
> there were no cancers; but the graph has no units, e.g., this might be
> 1,000 rad CEDE, or local tissue dose, etc.
> 
> Are there any references on the web with quantitative data?
> 
> thank you, mike
> 
> "Shlala gashle" (Zulu greeting, meaning "Stay safe")
> mike (mcnaught@LANL.GOV)