Word: radium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...while Johnny insisted that he had bought cobalt 60 for $18 from a "Canadian institution," spilled a solution of it on his hands. But with the notable exception of radium itself, most radioactive isotopes are under rigid control. They cannot be imported without an AEC permit. At length, Johnny spilled the truth...
...that a New Yorker now in his mid-70s wrote to the advertiser (the Radioactivity Center of M.I.T.) and told his story. About 30 years ago he was working as a salesman, playing the guitar for relaxation. When he began to feel run down, a friend suggested a radium tonic to pep him up. His doctor saw nothing against it-for these were the days when many medical men were playing fast and loose with radium preparations, knowing and recking nothing of the dangers.* The salesman dropped in at the plant in East Orange, NJ. where Radithor was made, horse...
...Philadelphia businessman, now 63, bothered by some kind of rheumatism back in 1918, took a radium tonic then for about two months, quit when it gave no relief. Later, under X rays because his joints still creaked, his bones showed puzzling deposits. At M.I.T., Dr. Evans and colleagues found that he still had 25 times the calculated safe dose of radium in him, figured that he had originally consumed 1,000 times the safe dose...
Higher Margin? Strangely, though many victims of the radium-tonic craze were made severely ill, some lost limbs and a few died as a direct result of poisoning, most of the long-term survival cases now under study appear to be in good health. Especially notable is the fact that among the 160 so far examined, Dr. Evans has found not a single case of leukemia. The continuing study at M.I.T., broadening out since doctors all over the U.S. were alerted by the A.M.A. Journal to search their memories and patients' histories for radium-craze cases, is expected...
...possibility is that Dr. Evans was overconservative back in 1941 when he set the safe "maximum permissible body burden" of radium at one ten-millionth of a gram. If so, some of the alarm about recent fallout may be allayed, because the 1941 radium standard was the base on which all other permissible body burdens have been computed. But if Dr. Evans was overconservative then, it was a good fault: after the haphazard misuse of radium only a decade earlier, a strong corrective was needed...