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The Radium Girls -- and Radioactive Toothpaste
They wouldn't lie to you would they? Radium City (documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLS6NCZPiSY The Radium Girls and the Generation that brushed its Teeth with Radioactive Toothpaste http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/07/0 … othepaste/ "the most baffling part about this story is not the fact that the general public had no idea that radium was so dangerous, but the fact that some people most certainly did! And yet, they sat back and watched as everyone around them was poisoning themselves. The suits and scientists behind the U.S. Radium Corporation were probably the worst. Knowing very well that UnDark’s key ingredient was approximately one million times more active than uranium, they were careful to avoid any exposure to it themselves. While their young female factory workers fresh out of high school were literally encouraged to swallow radium on a daily basis, the owners and chemists were using lead screens, masks and tongs to handle the radium." "With the help of doctors and dentists on their payroll, the company rejected claims that their workers were sick from radium exposure. They tried to pin the girls’ deaths on syphilis to smear the reputations of the young unmarried women who had come to work for them. Inexplicably, the medical community went along with all of it, fully cooperating with the powerful companies." "The right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was also established as a direct result of the Radium Girls case." A little Thorium for that "glow"  Jul 04 15 02:28 pm Link Great article. I didn't know about the labor rights ruling. My mother recalls when shoe stores had x-ray machines and you could look at your feet inside your shoes. I wonder how many people those things killed off. You may also like the documentary "Atomic Cafe." A sobering look at the state of our ignorance. Jul 05 15 05:22 am Link When I was five or so years old, I was given a Russian made wrist watch for Christmas. I adored it, and took excellent care of it. It glowed brightly enough to read by, so I could use it as a flashlight and read well past my sleep time. Inexplicably, it stopped working a few months after Christmas. My father was sure it was somehow my fault, all my protestations to the contrary. It wasn't until a few years ago I stumbled upon a citation that these watches had so much radium in them that they were literally self destructing. Jul 05 15 07:57 pm Link fascinating Thank you Jul 07 15 09:22 am Link For another chapter of our troubling history of exposing citizens to radiation, read the book American Ground Zero by Carole Gallagher. I have a friend whose father was in the Army and was assigned to "observe" one of the nuclear test blasts in Nevada. He bore radiation caused illness for the rest of his life, which ended prematurely. Jul 07 15 09:48 am Link Shadow Dancer wrote: John Wayne, etc. Did all the actors on that Nevada set die of cancer? Jul 07 15 09:15 pm Link SAND DIAL wrote: The relative bulk of the cast and crew, yes. Jul 07 15 10:13 pm Link Michael Bots wrote: That's actually a pretty cool flower. I hope someone gathers seeds and breeds more. I'd love to plant a whole field of them. Jul 07 15 10:20 pm Link |
