I have heard credible stories of watchmakers that have had their shops shut down, and decontaminated by EPA/DOE guys in moon suits. They arrested the driver, and got from him the location where the "radioactive" scrap was picked up.Īnyway, my point is the level of hysteria over radioactive materials has reached a point where radium dials on watches might draw unwanted attention to their wearers/owners. These roadside detectors now litter the interstate highway system, and appear at the gates of most public facilities that take truck traffic. The TSA/homeland security guys were clued into this fact by catching a truck (that was carrying a load of scrap) with one of their road side radiation detectors. It occurs to me that I recently read an artical in my local newspaper about a scrap yard that was shut down by the EPA because it had some old WWII airplane instruments with radium dials. Just some things to think about before you accept radium dials into your collection. Your body expects to have a certain amount of radium in your bones (radium behaves like calcium chemically), so it is hard to say whether this will increase your risk of cancer, or not. Given enough years of this, some damage might occur. If a bit of radium gets inhaled, and lodges in a sinus, or in your lungs, it will spend its time there 24/7, for the next 1600 years, shooting alpha, some beta, and gamma particles, at a slow rate, out through your body. The big risk to a watchmaker is the dust that breaks free of the dial can easily be inhaled.We do spend our time with our noses very close to our work. but given time, it destroys the binders, and becomes somewhat friable. The radium is bound into the paint or wax very well. Radium paint and waxes, when new (and not ingested, or painted on your body!) are essentially harmless. Lead paint, arsenic compounds, mercury compounds, organic solvents, fertilizer, all would cause malaise of some sort if ingested. I cannot imagine the ignorance it would take to intentionally ingest paints and other chemicals used in industry. and, from time to time, they even painted dials. They did amazingly stupid things like: point their brushes with their tongues and lips, paint their teeth, paint their finger nails, paint their lips (and other body parts to surprise their husbands/boyfriends. 'Oops' is never good occupational health policy.The important point of the Radium Girls story (that many people miss in their hysteria over radioactive materials) is these girls were simply begging to be damaged by the substance. "We really don't want our factory workers to be the guinea pigs for discovery. By the time World War II came around, the federal government had set basic safety limits for handling radiation.Īnd, she says, there are still lessons to be learned about how we protect people who work with new, untested substances. At 107 years old, she was one of the last of the radium girls.īlum says the radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. You just don't know what to blame," she said. "I was left with different things, but I lived through them. There's no way to know if her time in the factory contributed. Over the years, she had some health problems - bad teeth, migraines, two bouts with cancer. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning.īut Keane was among the hundreds who survived. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S. Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. "There was one woman who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum.
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