Radium Poisoning

Natural radium is produced in the environment through the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium and is found at very low levels in bedrock, soil, plants, the atmosphere, and animals including humans. Its most common isotopes are Ra-226, Ra-224, and Ra-228. High concentrations of radium may be found in bodies of water in certain locations. As a result, radium may be concentrated in fish and other aquatic organisms and be bio-concentrated through the food web. Radium is also present in the environment as a result of human agency, specifically through mining and manufacturing processes that increase exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation.

Author’s Rant: Exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation, no matter if its source is natural or not, remains a highly controversial topic that is subject to considerable scientific discussion. That heated debate began in the 1950s and early 1960s when scientists like Alice Stewart, George W. Kneale, Ian MacKenzie, C.K. Wanebo, Ernest Sternglass, and others began questioning levels of radiation exposure certified safe by the Atomic Energy Commission. The debate took on new life when the well-known and highly respected nuclear chemist/cardiologist, John Gofman (who at the time was Associate Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and his associate Arthur Tamplin (a research biophysicist at the Lab), first published their findings that no level of ionizing radiation was safe. Not long after that the Atomic Energy Commission cut off their funding for research.

The AEC, and its successor agency, the Department of Energy, has a long and shameful history of trying to suppress research that it deemed inimical to its primary mission of supporting and growing the nuclear industry. The honor roll of prominent scientists the AEC-DOE either fired, vilified, or tried to make their professional lives miserable because their research results did not meet AEC-DOE’s agenda includes John Gofman, PhD, MD (nuclear/physical chemist and renowned cardiologist; co-discoverer of protactinium-232, uranium-232, protactinium-233, and uranium-233 and proved the slow and fast neutron fissionability of uranium-233); Arthur Tamplin, PhD (biophysicist); Alice Stewart, MD (epidemiologist); Ernest Sternglass, PhD (radiological physicist), George Kneale, PhD (bio-statistician); Karl Z. Morgan, PhD (physicist and widely regarded as the “Founder” of Health Physics who in 1972 resigned his position as Head of Health Physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory when he was ordered by his superiors to suppress information in his possession about the toxicity of plutonium); Greg Wilkinson, MD (epidemiologist); Henry W. Kendall, PhD (physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate, and one of the founders of the Union of Concerned Scientists); and Thomas Mancuso, MD (epidemiologist), among many others. The tactic used by the AEC-DOE when controversy arose was to use researchers on its payroll, or whose professional work was dependent on agency funding, who were more sympathetic to its interests and persuade them to demonstrate its nuclear activities were not harmful rather than address objectively the issues that had been raised by more independent-minded scientists.

Historical Background: Not long after its discovery, radium was used by doctors and variously guised health practitioners in Europe and the U.S. to treat patients with dozens of diseases and complaints, including everything from acne to insanity. It was administered orally, by inhalation and injection, and even by enema and suppository. Consumer products containing radium included hair tonic, toothpaste, ointments, and a wide range of liquid-based elixirs. For example, in 1901 a French physician used radium in an effort to cure lupus and various skin lesions. Later physicians used it to treat a variety of cancers, unknowingly causing even more cancer. Without any doubt, the famous physicist Marie Curie (Polish-born Maria Sklodowska — pronounced sklaw-DAWF-skah), the scientist who first isolated radium in its pure metallic form and won her second Nobel Prize for the effort, died from leukemia as a result of radium exposure.

But the worst early cases of radium poisoning weren’t those of isolated scientists here or there but hundreds of workers at watch and watch dial factories in the U.S. It all had to do with the natural properties of the metal, which, when purified, glows in the dark. During World War I, that property was exploited in the manufacture of dials for clocks, wrist watches, aircraft gauges, and other instruments that needed to be readable in the dark before the risks of radium exposure were widely understood. Without doubt, the general public was absolutely fascinated with radium’s mysterious luminescent properties. Industries sprang up to manufacture hundreds of consumer products containing radium. It was used it on glow-in-the-dark numbers for houses, theater seats, and luminous lamp-pulls. At about the same time, the general public discovered that wristwatch dials could be seen more readily at night if the dials were painted with a luminous material that contained radium. Almost overnight luminous watch faces became the rage and the manufacture of luminous dials suddenly became an important and well-paying industry.

Radium dial painting began in 1917 and over the next decade about 2,000 young women were employed as dial-painters. That work occurred mostly in about a dozen locations but especially at larger dial and watch factories in Waterbury, Connecticut; Orange, New Jersey; and Ottawa, Illinois. Ignorant of the health hazards of their jobs, the dial-painters breathed air saturated with radium particles and touched contaminated surfaces every working day. But, much worse, the luminescent radium paint was applied to the dials by the young women with very fine brushes. To keep the brush tips pointed, the dial-painters were instructed to twirl the end of the brush between their lips and shape it with their tongues. Many young women would use the paint on the buttons of their clothing to make them glow in the dark and also applied it to their fingernails, eyelids, and assorted other body parts. As a result, the dial-painters ingested radium almost daily; hundreds contracted malignant cancers, suffered bone disfigurements, became seriously ill with other diseases, and died. Although the technique of lip-pointing the brushes was abolished throughout the industry in 1927, by that time many dozen dial-painters had died from radium exposure and many dozen others had contacted serious illnesses, including disfiguring cancers and osteomyelitis of the upper and lower jaw and buccal cavity.

Former dial and watch factory sites that were and still are contaminated with radium include the site of the former U.S. Radium Corporation factory in Orange, New Jersey, and five plants in Connecticut: the former Waterbury Clock Factory, the former Lux Clock Factory, and the former Benrus Clock Company buildings in Waterbury; the former Sessions Clock Company in Bristol; and the former Seth Thomas Clock Company in Thomaston. Many of those abandoned factories are now superfund sites. For readers with a sense of history, the U.S. Radium Corporation was responsible for the infamous Radium Girls trial in the late 1920s, which was settled out of court when the company agreed to pay the plaintiffs the paltry sum of $10,000 each and $600 a month for as long as they lived. Which, it turned out, wasn’t very long.[1]

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[1] For additional information, see: Claudia Clark Radium Girls, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997; and Ross Mullner, Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy, American Public Health Association Publications, 1999.