When the word “radioactive” was in fashion: The case of the Radium Girls

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In the 1920s in the United States, the “Radium Girls”, female workers who worked using radioactive luminescent paints used as dial paint in watch factories, suffered severe and often fatal radiation poisoning from radium, victims of the economic benefits of industry after the shortly before discovery of radioactivity by Pierre and Marie Curie. Two industries in the US had conquered the market by colouring the dials of “luminous clocks” with a radioactive paint capable of lighting up at night. The workers who painted the dials began to show the first symptoms of poisoning for no apparent reason. Between 1917 and 1926, the industry hired about 70 women from Essex County, New Jersey, and in 1927, over 50 of these women died from radioactive paint poisoning. The most alarming thing about radioactive products has been the awareness of mass poisoning by the industry and its scientists. When the workers suspected that the work environment was causing these problems, medical and toxicological investigations were carried out. The women finally reached an out-of-court settlement from the industries that included $ 100,000 in compensation, paid legal and medical bills, and an allowance of $ 600 per year for all remaining (short) life. The lives of those girls had been sacrificed, but all the workers in the Western world owe something to those girls who died of radioactive poisoning. Years later, the tobacco industry re-proposed the same scenario by hiding and denying the health hazards of tobacco cigarette smoke, against all scientific evidence that denounced the presence of harmful and carcinogenic substances in it. Also in this case, the connivance of some medical-scientific sectors helped to strengthen the impenetrable cord of silence, fortunately torn down in the late 1990s thanks to the testimony of an insider Dr. Jeff Wigand, at that time an employee of Brown & Williamson Company.