The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified 1,177 sites on its National Priorities List (NPL). Exposure to higher levels of Radium-226 can cause cancer, anemia, cataracts, and fractured teeth. PUBLIC HEALTH STATEMENT This Statement was prepared to give you information about radium and to emphasize the human health effects that may result from exposure to it. Alpha particles cannot travel through skin, beta particles can penetrate the skin, and gamma radiation can go through the entire human body. Business influence, I hypothesis, explains the hostility or indifference on the part of government bureaucrats and medical specialists to the dialpainters' tripartite campaign for recognition of radium poisoning, compensation for its victims, and prevention of future cases. Radium-226 emits alpha, beta or gamma radiation in the form of rays, particles and waves. The conclusion that radium was dangerous was resisted by radium corporation officials at every step. Eventually, radium in the luminous paint was accepted as the cause of the jaw infections, and of anemias, spontaneous bone fractures, and cancers. Two of the main radium isotopes found in the environment are radium-226 and radium-228. The luminescence of such paints depends on scintillation. The dialpainters were joined in this effort by progressive women reformers of the Consumers' League. Uranium and thorium are found in small amounts in most rocks and soil. Published Online: About Abstract In the manufacture of luminous paints crystallised zinc sulphide is mixed with radium, mesothorium, or radiothorium. This paper traces the campaign to prove the occupational origins of the dialpainters' illnesses. The dial-painters, their families, friends, and physicians, soon suspected occupational poisoning, but it took them several years to persuade medical and government authorities that they were right.
By the early 1920s, a small number of them began to suffer a variety of bewildering symptoms, including horrible, disfiguring infections of the bones of the jaw. During World War I, young women were employed as "dialpainters": they painted numbers on watches and dials with luminous paint.
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