RE: Radium

["Lavera, Ron" <Ron.Lavera@nypa.gov>]

I was wondering if any body knew of any kind of dose estimate for Ms.
Curie ?

...  mine and mine alone ...
ron lavera
lavera.r@nypa.gov

-----Original Message-----
From: Rrk099@aol.com [mailto:Rrk099@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 1998 10:06 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Radium


Radsafers,

To continue the thread on radium dial painters, the following article
appeared
in yesterday's (10-6-98) NYTimes Science section.

Bob Kulikowski
RRK099@aol.com


A Glow in the Dark, and a Lesson in Scientific Peril

By DENISE GRADY


  This year is the 100th anniversary of the Nobel-prize-winning
experiments by
Marie and Pierre Curie into the origins of radioactivity, and their
discovery
of the radioactive elements polonium and radium. Marie Curie herself
coined
the term "radioactivity," and a century ago, the word conveyed promise
and
evoked excitement. As the spontaneous release of energy from certain
substances, radioactivity was regarded as a newly identified force of
nature,
something that would surely lead to insights into the structure of
matter, and
to practical applications in medicine and science. 

  But as they would with other 20th century marvels, scientists soon
realized
that they might have unleashed a menace. They began to suspect that
radiation
might be a threat to health. Another decade went by, though, before
those
concerns were taken seriously. Marie Curie tended to deny the perils of
radiation, despite being deeply troubled by the deaths in the 1920's of
colleagues and radiation workers from leukemia.. 

  Curie's decades of exposure left her chronically ill and nearly blind
from
cataracts, and ultimately caused her death at 67, in 1934, from either
severe
anemia or leukemia. But she never fully acknowledged that her work had
ruined
her health. 

  Her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, and son-in-law, Frederic
Joliot-Curie --
also Nobel Prize winners -- continued her work with radioactive
material.
Eventually, both also died of diseases induced by radiation. 

  But by all accounts Marie Curie was so intent on her research that
even if
she had recognized the risks there is no reason to believe she would
have done
anything differently -- or that she necessarily should have, given her
achievements. 

  When Marie and Pierre Curie began to experiment with radiation,
advances in
physics had just begun to capture the public imagination. X-rays,
discovered
by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, were being used to diagnose broken bones
and help
surgeons find bullets, and X-ray pictures of the human body had
fascinated
newspaper readers. 

  The Curies set out to study radioactivity in 1898, two years after
Henri
Becquerel discovered the phenomenon when he noticed crystals of a
uranium salt
could fog a photographic plate. 

  Initially, the Curies studied emissions from various minerals and by
the end
of the year had made discoveries that would lead to a Nobel Prize they
shared
with Becquerel in 1903, and another awarded to Marie alone in 1911.
(Because
the Nobel is not awarded posthumously, Pierre Curie, who died in an
accident
in 1906, was not cited.) 

  Their first accomplishment was to show that radioactivity was a
property of
atoms themselves. Scientifically, that was the most important of their
findings, because it helped other researchers refine their understanding
of
atomic structure. 

  The second, more famous discovery, was the discovery of polonium and
radium.
Radium was the most radioactive substance the Curies had encountered.
Its
radioactivity is due to the large size of the atom, which makes the
nucleus
unstable and prone to decay, usually to radon and then lead, by emitting
particles and energy as it seeks a more stable configuration. 

  Radium does not exist free in nature; rather, like uranium, it is
melded
into the mineral pitchblende. To study radium, the Curies spent
countless
hours bathed in a radioactive miasma, stirring vats of pitchblende in
order to
extract infinitesimal amounts of radium. Marie Curie struggled to purify
it
for medical uses, including early radiation treatment for tumors. 

  But radium's bluish glow caught people's fancy, and companies in the
United
States began mining it and selling it as a novelty: for glow-in-the-dark
light
pulls, for instance, and bogus cure-all patent medicines that actually
killed
people. 

  Wristwatches with radium-painted luminous dials became a fad almost
overnight. The first large factory to produce the glowing watches, the
Radium
Luminous Materials Corporation, was opened in 1917, in Orange, N.J..
Soon,
other companies opened plants in Connecticut and Illinois. Several
million
radium watches and clocks and instrument dials were made through World
War II.

  The glowing numerals had to be hand-painted onto the watch dials, a
delicate
task deemed women's work. Dr. Claudia Clark, a professor of history at
Central
Michigan University who wrote "Radium Girls" (University of North
Carolina
Press, 1997), said the dial painters worked in "studios," where they
mixed
their own paint from a powdered base. The workers, some as young as 15,
painted about 250 dials a day for a cent and a half apiece, five and a
half
days a week. 

  Within a few years, some of the young women became horribly ill from
their
exposure to radium, and some died. 

  They have become a notorious chapter in the history of occupational
disease.

  Clark estimates that 4,000 women were dial painters. 

  Until sometime in the 1920's, the women were encouraged to use a
technique
called "lip-pointing," which meant using their lips and tongues to shape
their
paintbrushes to a fine tip. Not only were their mouths and teeth bathed
in
radium all day, but the women probably swallowed and inhaled it as well,
and
they often went home so coated with radioactive paint dust that they
glowed in
the dark. Unaware of any risk, some painted their lips, teeth, eyelids,
fingernails and the buttons on their clothes with the luminous solution.


  Meanwhile, more knowledgeable employees in other parts of the plant
were
beginning to use protective gear and shields when working with radium.
And in
1921, while the dial-painting studios were in full swing, Marie Curie
visited
America and was presented with one gram of radium -- which was enclosed
in a
110-pound, lead lined casket. 

  The dial-painters' first health problems turned up in the 1920's, when
some
of the women began suffering from fatigue, anemia and trouble with their
teeth. When dentists tried to extract the bad teeth, they were horrified
to
find jawbones so diseased that chunks of bone came out as well. The
extraction
sites didn't heal, and infections set in. 

  In many cases, the women's bodies were actually radioactive, because
radium
had been absorbed by their bones. Government researchers studied live
and dead
dial painters and used the data to calculate safe exposure levels for
future
generations of workers. 

  By 1923, five young women from the Orange plant had died from a
condition
that came to be called "radium jaw." The same thing had begun happening
to
dial painters in Connecticut and Illinois. As more time passed, some of
the
women developed bone cancers. 

  What makes radium so dangerous is that it forms chemical bonds in the
same
way as calcium, and the body can mistake it for calcium and absorb it
into the
bones. Then, it can bombard cells with radiation at close range, which
may
cause bone tumors or bone-marrow damage that can give rise to anemia or
leukemia. 

  How many women were sickened by working with radium is unknown.
Medical
experts blamed bone disease and bone and head cancers on radium, though
other
tumors, like breast cancer, that developed later in life were virtually
impossible to trace. Of 1,600 women listed in government records as
having
worked with radium before 1927, 86 had cancers that were probably linked
to
it. By 1929, 23 other women had died from noncancerous diseases caused
by
radium. 

  Though they put a stop to lip-pointing, the radium companies initially
tried
to deny any connection between radium and illness. 

  Legal battles dragged on. Some women received settlements, but others
never
did. 

  One radium girl was Margaret Looney, who died in 1929, at 24, after
seven
years of work at the Luminous Processes Plant in Ottawa, Ill. Her sister
Jean
Schott, who still lives in Ottawa, was only 6 when Ms. Looney died, but
she
remembers her mother rising at 5:00 A.M. every day and walking a mile to
the
cemetery to visit the grave. 

  "Every family has sadness and grief," Schott said. "Nobody gets by
without
it. But Margaret's death was unnecessary." The family sought
compensation, but
never received any. 

  About 50 years after Ms. Looney's death, her family allowed
researchers from
Argonne National Laboratory, which maintains the dial painters' medical
records, to exhume her body for study. Ms. Looney's bones, Mrs. Schott
said,
were found to be highly radioactive. 




Tuesday, October 6, 1998
<A HREF="aol://4344:104.nytcopy.6445375.574106743">Copyright 1998 The
New York
Times</A>
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