Medicine: Radium Hangovers

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Radium-Treated Patients University research center looking for persons who received radium injections or who drank radium solutions, such as "Radithor," before 1935. Write Z7516— Advt.

This advertisement, with the rare privilege of Page One prominence by the New York Times, got results. One was that a New Yorker now in his mid-70s wrote to the advertiser (the Radioactivity Center of M.I.T.) and told his story. About 30 years ago he was working as a salesman, playing the guitar for relaxation. When he began to feel run down, a friend suggested a radium tonic to pep him up. His doctor saw nothing against it—for these were the days when many medical men were playing fast and loose with radium preparations, knowing and recking nothing of the dangers.* The salesman dropped in at the plant in East Orange, NJ. where Radithor was made, horse-traded his guitar for four cases (25 bottles to the case) of elixir. Each tiny bottle contained about a millionth of a gram of radium, the same amount of mesothorium.

Seven Times Safety. The salesman drank three cases, generously let his sister have the fourth case. He would have taken more, but fortunately for him—and others—the Radithor outfit went out of business. Recently, responding to M.I.T.'s invitation, he presented himself for a checkup. Dr. Robley Dunglison Evans, 51, had him breathe into a glass flask, to test for radon gas in his breath, and into a mask hooked up to another flask to test for another gas, thoron, that has a half life of only 54 seconds. An ultra-sensitive scintillation counter scanned his whole body for gamma rays. X rays searched his bones for radioactive deposits. There, though the now retired salesman seems to be in good health, Dr. Evans found seven times as much radioactivity as he considered safe for a man to carry around.

A Philadelphia businessman, now 63, bothered by some kind of rheumatism back in 1918, took a radium tonic then for about two months, quit when it gave no relief. Later, under X rays because his joints still creaked, his bones showed puzzling deposits. At M.I.T., Dr. Evans and colleagues found that he still had 25 times the calculated safe dose of radium in him, figured that he had originally consumed 1,000 times the safe dose.

Higher Margin? Strangely, though many victims of the radium-tonic craze were made severely ill, some lost limbs and a few died as a direct result of poisoning, most of the long-term survival cases now under study appear to be in good health. Especially notable is the fact that among the 160 so far examined, Dr. Evans has found not a single case of leukemia. The continuing study at M.I.T., broadening out since doctors all over the U.S. were alerted by the A.M.A. Journal to search their memories and patients' histories for radium-craze cases, is expected to reveal the reasons for these anomalous findings.

One possibility is that Dr. Evans was overconservative back in 1941 when he set the safe "maximum permissible body burden" of radium at one ten-millionth of a gram. If so, some of the alarm about recent fallout may be allayed, because the 1941 radium standard was the base on which all other permissible body burdens have been computed. But if Dr. Evans was overconservative then, it was a good fault: after the haphazard misuse of radium only a decade earlier, a strong corrective was needed.