Guy wires:

> The radiation from the old "Glow in the dark" watches was negligible.
>  Assemblers still died from it.

That is only sort of true. The women who worked for the Radium Dial company
were asked to make a fine tip on the end of the brushes that they used to
paint the radium onto the watch hands by rolling the brush tip on their
tongues, thus they ingested some small amount of radium during the course of
their employments.

As apparently a consequence of that ingestion, they suffered leukemias,
anemias and bone tumors slightly higher than the general population in their
old age, but not greatly so. For more information, see for example:

     http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/40/046.html

This is one of the case studies that I worked on for a few weeks when I
worked at Nuclear Weapons Effects Laboratory at White Sands Missile Range 30
years ago.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *