'Oops' is never good occupational health policy. "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. Eben Byers only quit his Radithor habit after having drunk more than 1,400 bottles of it over a. Copyright: Attribution Non-Commercial (BY. One ex-employee, Grace Fryer, had a jawbone riddled with holes, like. WSJ story about the 1932 death of pro golfer and industrialist Eben Byers, who suffered progressive radium poisoning. Radium is preferentially carried to the jaw, where it concentrates and does constant damage to the surrounding tissue. 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. Specifically, it carries them to the bones. 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. significant amounts of radium in his bones resulting in the loss of most of his jaw. ![]() 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. Eben McBurney Byers was a wealthy American socialite, athlete. ![]() Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. - His upper and lower jaw had decayed, also known as radium jaw. 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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