Medicine: Radioactivity Scare

In a radioactive world, nobody ever feels completely safe. Radioactivity, a stealthy, silent horror that is neither felt nor seen, is both a mental and a physical hazard. Last week the U.S. had a small sample of the radioactivity fear that may become commonplace in the Atomic Age.

An Associated Press story from Fort Worth, Tex. reported the death of one Wilton Rhodes Earle, 39, onetime accountant at the atomic bomb plant at Oak Ridge. Said the A.P., quoting an "autopsy surgeon": Earle had died of atomic radiation to which he was exposed at Oak Ridge.

It did not take long for the story—and public alarm—to balloon. Atomic Energy Commission experts hastened to Fort Worth. Telephone wires from Washington began to hum. But it soon turned out that the news reports were superheated.

The facts: because Earle had complained of radiation sickness, the doctor had borrowed an old Geiger counter from Texas Christian University and reported that Earle's body was emitting "gamma rays." But the doctor found that Earle's death was due not to radiation but to acute hepatitis (inflammation of the liver).

When A.E.C. experts hastily examined the body (reportedly after it was in the coffin) with their own instruments, they could detect no radiation. Said the A.E.C. report: Earle had never been exposed to radioactive material while working at Oak Ridge. (Other sources reported that he had left there an alcoholic—which might account for his fatal liver disorder.) Nonetheless, A.E.C. was determined to get to the bottom of the story for the sake of its workers' morale and its touchy recruitment problem. But A.E.C.'s chief medical adviser, dispatched to Fort Worth, ran into a major snag: on advice of counsel Earle's family refused to permit further examination of his body. At week's end, the Fort Worth radioactivity scare was still unresolved.*

Meanwhile, another radioactivity case came to a tragic but clear-cut end. Dorothy L. Burns, 30, last fall sued Westinghouse for $200,000, claiming that she had contracted radiation sickness in a war-job at Westinghouse's Bloomfield, NJ. plant. Her illness, marked by fibrous degeneration of both lungs and a slow wasting away, puzzled doctors. Last week Miss Burns died. Reported Medical Examiner Harrison S. Martland (who in the '20s discovered radium sickness among a group of women painting luminous watch dials): Miss Burns did not die of radiation sickness. Her illness was beryllium poisoning, caused by inhaling beryllium dust, used in the manufacture of fluorescent lamps.