RSH Data & Documents

"Low Level
Radiation Health
Effects: Compiling
the Data"

Revision 2
March 30, 1999
by Radiation, Science, and
Health, Inc.,
Edited by J. Muckerheide

1.2.4
Radium Body-Burden

"However, as data have been compiled for a substantial proportion of the estimated total population at risk of exposure to radium between 1915 and 1979, end points of interest that have been evaluated include mortality due to all and specific cause (Polednak et al 1978; Stebbings et al 1984); mortality due to leukemia (Spiers et al 1983); breast cancer (Adams et al 1980); and multiple myeloma (Cuzick 1981; Stebbings et al 1990); thyroid tumors and thyroid function (Polednak 1986); ocular cataracts (Adams et al 1983); and fertility (Polednak 1980; Schieve et al 1997). Although increased risks were observed for some of these disease outcomes, no significant or unequivocal relationships with prior exposure to radium have been found."

"Epidemiological follow-up of the U.S. female dial workers for over 70 years has failed to unequivocally identify causal associations between delayed health outcomes and their prior occupational exposure to radium, other than the bone sarcomas and 'head' carcinomas, and these only among workers whose residual body burdens of radium exceeded the 'tolerance dose' proposed by Evans more than 50 years ago (Evans 1943). The simple intervention in the mid 1920s of banning the practice of tipping brushes contaminated with radium-enhanced paint by drawing them through the lips apparently prevented ingestion of hazardous amounts of radium by subsequent generations of dial workers, thereby supporting the hypothesis of a 'practical' threshold dose below which there are no clinically detectable effects. The early establishment of 0.1 mCi of radium as the basis for protection standards for radium and other internally deposited radionuclides has served the nuclear industry well as seen in the findings of the follow-up for 50 years of the early plutonium workers (Voelz 1997).