RE: Radium -Reply

[rkathren@tricity.wsu.edu (Ron L. Kathren)]

With all due respect to my good friend, colleague and fellow history buff
Charlie Willis, some commentary on his commentary is indicated.

1.  Given the type of work that Mme Curie did, and the conditions under
which she did it, it is more likely than not that she in fact carried a
significant measureable body burden of radium at the time of her death.
Recall there were no health physicists in those days, and radiation
protection guidance did not appear for many years after the isolation and
discovery of radium.  Even then the concept was based on 'tolerance dose' --
ie the dose which a person could incur without demonstrable ill effects.
The leukemogenic potential of exposure had been demonstrated, but was really
not factored into the early protection schema.

2.  I agree that she was known to have suffered from pernicious anemia, and
that this was given as the cause of death.  That does not exclude the
possibility that she also suffered from a radiation induced leukemia at the
time of her death.  The fact that diagnostic procedures 60+ years ago were
simply not as advanced as they are today might account for an equivocal
diagnosis.  By way of analogy, most elderly men have prostate cancer at the
time of their deaths, but relatively few die from it; most die from some
other unrelated cause.

3.  Mme Curie may (or may not) have had a substantial deposition of Ra in
the skeleton.  If she did, using the classic dial painter data put forth by
Robley Evans, the liklihood of her developing an osteosarcoma would have
been less than 50%.  Evans work, it may be recalled, showed that for any
given, only about 35-40% of the dial painters got osteosarcomas.  Today we
know that those who did not may have been protected by their genetic makeup.

4.  While I agree that the cause of death sheds little light on the question
of dose, it does not rule out high doses or internal depositions.  One only
needs to look at the Thorotrast patients who incurred massive bone doses
(thousands of rem or many tens of Sv) but not all of whom suffered from
leukemia or the even larger dose incurred by the Hanford americium victim,
who 11 years and millions of rem later was free of leukemia.

Ron Kathren 

At 08:39 AM 10/8/98 -0500, Charles Willis wrote:
>Ron, 
>
>I have toyed with the question of the probable doses received by Mme. Curie and
>concluded that, in this instance, dose "reconstruction" is not likely to
lead to a
>useful result.  Clearly, the doses were highly non-uniform and quite
sensitive to
>laboratory conditions.  It seems likely that her effective dose equivalent
would be
>dominated by the lung doses from radon daughters, but she did not die of lung
>cancer.  If there was a substantial internal dose, it might have been from
radium,
>but she did not die of bone sarcoma.  If the dominant doses were from external
>sources, the principal concern would have been leukemia if she had died
young, but
>at age 66,  current risk estimates would lead us to expect "other cancer,"
if the
>effect were radiogenic.  Still, it is often said that Mme. Curie died of
radiogenic
>leukemia but that is not the medical opinion.  Her doctors said that she
died of
>Pernicious Anemia (the inability of the intestines to absorb vitamin B-12)
which, I
>am told by the medical folk, would not have been confused with leukemia. 
>Pernicious anemia, so far as we know today, is not radiogenic.
>
>Thus, cause of death seems to shed little light on the question of dose,
except to
>suggest that she did not have a large body burden of radium.  Any inference
that
>might be made about lung dose is limited by the likelihood that she did not
smoke.
>
>Charlie Willis
>caw@nrc.gov
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