'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. 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. The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their. You just don't know what to blame," she said. The Radium Girls and the Generation that brushed its Teeth with Radioactive Toothpaste. "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. 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. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S. In the early years these girls used paint brushes that they would lick the bristles to. The pay was fantastic roughly three times the average working girls’ wage and the work was light. These treatments were strictly for the rich gram for gram, radium was the most expensive substance on earth. In 1917, scores of patriotic young girls counted themselves lucky to have landed war work at a large warehouse complex in Orange, New Jersey. Others took to drinking radium water, or visiting radium clinics and spas. Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. Radium was radioactive and caused serious deformities and sickness. The Radium Girls were even told to lick their brushes to get a fine point for detail work. "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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