Word: radium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Muller made this discovery, he may have heard a roll of distant thunder, but he could not have known what it meant. In the year 1926, long before Hiroshima, no man-made radioactivity was at large on earth outside the range of X-ray machines and radium capsules, and none was expected. No one suspected that in less than 20 years the mutation-producing effects of radiation would be a worldwide worry...
...danger skyrockets: part of the shielding may be removed for nucleonics technicians to work on the power plant. Another oddity: though detectable radiation gets into the air and might conceivably build up to health-hazard proportions, it does not come from the reactor. The heavy villains are the radium-painted luminous dials and markers used to permit operating in the dark. In a completely closed ventilating system with recycled air, the radon gas emitted by such markers becomes so concentrated that it could hinder detection of an actual reactor leak. After the markers were replaced by a nonradioactive type...
...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. After eight minutes, he took the gadget out, put it in its case and sent Joke home...
That night Joke began to vomit. Her parents wrapped the vomit in newspaper and tossed it into the stove. Next morning Joke seemed all right and went off to kindergarten; her father threw the ashes from the stove on a backyard dump. A doctor, checking radium needles at the hospital, noticed that the tip of the one used on Joke (it had already been condemned because of oxidation at the junction of head and shaft) was missing. When it could not be found in the treatment room, out went the alarm...
...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...