Word: haanschoten
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mortal danger: forbidden to set foot here," read the police signs around the Haanschoten family's modest little house in the Netherlands town of Putten (pop. 12,000), south of the Zuider Zee. To enforce the order, barbed wire was strung around three sides of the house and its yard, and police mounted 24-hour guard. A team of radiation experts worked with a scintillation counter over every square foot of the grounds. The counter registered 60 times the normal (background) radioactivity. Technicians, looking like spacemen in white rubber suits with protective masks and gloves, used long-handled shovels...
Jacoba ("Joke") Haanschoten, 5, a child of a Putten factory worker, had enlarged and infected adenoids that threatened to block a Eustachian tube. Such blockage could, in turn, cause infection of the middle ear. A fortnight ago Joke (pronounced Yo-ka) went to Utrecht's City and Academic Hospital, 25 miles away. Doctors decided to destroy the diseased, swollen tissue with powerful gamma rays from a radium "needle"-actually a blunt metal capsule, 20 mm. by 3 mm., on a long, flexible shaft. One doctor pushed this up Joke's nose until it curved down into the nasopharynx...
While public-health officials worked to decontaminate the Haanschoten family and their neighbors, doctors pieced together a theory of what had happened. The needle - a powerful 50 millicurie source, 500,000 times what can be safely left in the body for a lifetime-had broken off in Joke's nasopharynx. She had swallowed it. During the evening, the radiation made Joke sick. When she vomited, up came the needle. In the stove, the capsule was destroyed and the radium salt was scattered through the ashes...
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