Mae Keane, swallowed radium, died at age 107

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting that she lived to be 107 despite the radiation exposure. This is possibly in the same category of story as the apartment building in Taiwan that was accidentally built with weakly radioactive steel, and the people who lived there had lower than average cancer. There might be some very low level of radiation that does more harm than good. After all, we use it as the main form of therapy against cancer.

In the 1920s, a young working-class woman could land a job working with the miracle substance. Radium wristwatches were manufactured right here in America, and the U.S. Radium Corporation was hiring dial people to paint the tiny numbers onto watch faces for about 5 cents a watch.

They became known as the radium girls.

In order to get the numbers small enough, new hires were taught to do something called “lip pointing.” After painting each number, they were to put the tip of the paintbrush between their lips to sharpen it.

Twelve numbers per watch, upwards of 200 watches per day — and with every digit, the girls swallowed a little bit of radium.

“Of course, no one thought it was dangerous in these first couple of years,” explains Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook.

In 1924, a woman named Mae Keane was hired at a factory in Waterbury Connecticut. Her first day, she remembers she didn’t like the taste of the radium paint. It was gritty.

“I wouldn’t put the brush in my mouth,” she remembered many years later.

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After just a few days at the factory, the boss asked her if she’d like to quit, since she clearly didn’t like the work. She gratefully agreed.

“I often wish I had met him after to thank him,” Keane said, “because I would have been like the rest of them.”

Other women weren’t so lucky. By the mid-1920s, dial painters were falling ill by the dozens, afflicted with horrific diseases. The radium they had swallowed was eating their bones from the inside.

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    http://www.npr.org/2014/12/28/373510029/saved-by-a-bad-taste-the-last-radium-girl-dies-at-107
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