Mae Keane only recently passed away after living a long 107 years. But she’s lucky she didn’t die a painful death many decades ago. You see, Keane was once a “radium girl.”
With her U.S. Radium Corp. coworkers back in the 1920s, Keane sat in a sweltering factory room with no air conditioning. Their job was to paint glow-in-the-dark numbers on wristwatches using an amazing new product of radioactive paint. Today, of course, we know that paint to be the cause of fatal illnesses, but very many of those factory workers had to find out the hard way.
Keane didn’t have gloves, an air mask, nor any protective gear. None of the radium girls were suicidal ? they just didn’t know what killer they were encountering.
Radium was a fix-all, heal-all, bedazzle-all product. It looked magical when it glowed in the dark.
And salesmen promised it would everything from changing your sex life into a sizzling hot adventure to guaranteeing?longevity to changing all women into gorgeous swan-like creatures.
Doctors jumped onto the snake oil bandwagon. They used it to treat cancer and every lesser disease.
Author of?”The Poisoner’s Handbook” Deborah Blum explained why the killer was embraced.
“Of course, no one thought it was dangerous in these first couple of years.”
Since the numbers they painted onto the watches were so tiny, the women were told to do ?lip pointing.? That’s when they put the fibers of the brush between their lips to ?sharpen it? after each number they painted.
Imagine how many times each of the young women slipped a?paintbrush between her lips. And each time, they swallowed some of radium – of the killer.
Mae Keane was hired at the factory in 1924. But she didn’t like radium paint’s gritty taste.?On her first day, Keane?remembered years later:
“I wouldn’t put the brush in my mouth.”
After just a few days at the factory, the boss asked her if she’d like to quit, since she clearly didn’t like the work.
Keane?gratefully agreed.
“I often wish I had met him after to thank him, because I would have been like the rest of them.”
She was lucky. After just a few years the liquid killer was making the painters sick – very sick. The radium was literally ?eating their bones from the inside,? NPR recalls.
Blum wrote:
“There was one woman who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it. Their legs broke underneath them. Their spines collapsed.”
But Keane and hundreds of others survived the radium’s killer effects. Blum says:
“The radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. By the time World War II came around, the federal government had set basic safety limits for handling radiation.”
But get this – radium was used in factories well into the 1950s. Even now hundreds of factory workers are exposed to toxins like lead dust every day.
Sure, workers are supposed to wear masks, but the realities of the factory lines make that difficult.
Those exposed to lead today have miscarriages or their wives have them. And who knows what other diseases will start showing up?
For those who do not like government-imposed regulations, there should be some reasonable regulations to protect their health.
After all wouldn’t they want to live a long life like Mae Keane? She passed away as 2014 came to an end. She was 107.
