SPRING BREAKing Your Jaw (pt 1)

Drinking Yourself to Death

Sorry for the lull in posts, but SPRING BREAK. Surely that is clear enough of a reason. But I'll try to get back to it. So this post will loosely play off my spring break with a horrible play on words that will become obvious at the end of the story. And these pictures that don't seem very spring break related might just eventually make sense. Well ready?... Let's Go.

It may seem obvious, but radiation can be bad for you. The majority of us know this now. But today's blog will serve as a horror movie's worth of entertainment, showing what can happen in extreme cases of radioactive pollution in your water and hopefully this will show the need for environmental pathway modeling of pollutants. This type of exposure are what we are trying to learn about, model, and prevent.

Truthfully, these cases cannot be classified as a dispersion into groundwater with the fear of eventually being ingested. The cases I am about to talk about actually skip the accidental dispersion into groundwater and are purposeful placed into drinking water and ingested. Today I'm talking about Radithor. Radithor was ingested as a patented medicine in the early 1900s. If anything, I would liken it to something that is somewhere between 5 Hour Energy and your standard multivitamins (I by no means am asserting that 5 Hour Energy has a similar lethal capacity).  It was assumed that this liquid acts a general cure-all with many benefits : more energy, prevent insanity, slow aging..... Yet this cure-all was mainly Radium dissolved into a very purely distilled water. I know it would be very crazy to drink this, however, many did.

I wouldn't say these claims are completely baseless. I can see how people can come to the conclusion that extremely high doses of radiation are curative, albeit way to quickly. The assumed efficacy of Radithor was based on the limited knowledge of the curative effects of some hot springs. People that felt sick (possibly suffering from undiagnosed cancers) would emerge from hot springs eventually feeling much better.  What was happening? A person who seemed to be simply worn down (undiagnosed early cancer) eventually emerged feeling much better from the miraculous springs. Well someone eventually noticed that the hot springs were irradiating their users, radioactive springs. Thus someone else decided to jump to the conclusion that any and all radiation is good for not just the cancerous sick but for everyone. Add in a little bit more misinformation and some Get$RiCh$QuICk motive and Radithor was born. 

What made Radithor so dangerous? Well, some of the information that those misinformed were missing was the fact that the people were bathing in Radon-gas-dissolved-springwater, yet Radithor preaches drinking Radium dissolved water. I know that all my readers have been reading up to this point probably can spot the dangerous difference in treatment. But just for those new readers that I'm definitely roping in I'll go into it. Well we understand that both of these isotopes can decay by alpha emission. These alphas are deadly if ingested but much less so when externally applied. They rarely penetrate past the skin, depositing most of their energy mainly harmlessly in the dead regions of our outer epidermal skin layer. Yet now with Radithor we are ingesting them and applying it directly to our vital insides. Also there is the Radon-Radium difference. There were people bottling the radon hot spring water and getting people to drink it. Yet that item had its problems. When the spring water was removed from the environment, it no longer  could uptake Radon gas from its surroundings. Radon with its short half-life of 3.8 days would then mainly decay out and be escaping as a gas. Thus after a few weeks that hotspring water is no longer radioactive and no longer effective. So this Radithor inventor used Radium with it 1600 yr half-life and deemed it to be a superior product. Yet Radium is also very dangerous upon ingestion as it is in the same periodic group as Calcium. Thus it can act similarly and react similarly to Calcium (same valence). What does Calcium do in your body? A lot of things but it also is a major component of our bones. Thus with Radium in our body it will be mistaken for Calcium and become a lethal component of our bones.  It gets absorbed everywhere by the bones especially in the jaws of these Radithor drinkers. The set in Radium now irradiates all the surrounding cells and tissues, killing the bone it is set in, bone marrow, blood cells, muscle, and more. Thus leading to the Radium Jaw symptom and the title picture result.

This is kind of an extreme case. The types of dose experienced here due to direct ingestion would hardly what one should expect from exposures in the environment. Yet knowing these effects are important and are the reason why environmental modeling takes place. We want to prevent such high levels of exposure in our daily lives. Yes it did take some major mistakes in order to learn but atleast we did. I do not intend to make light of the lives lost due to such occurrences and I recognize their sad contribution and legacy in hopes of preventing such future tragedy. 

Oh, and while I'm rambling also wanted to touch on some general infallibility. It's a great thing that we are always making strides and always learning. Yet, notice how at one point these actions were generally accepted as safe. Irreperable harm was harm done and then the danger was acknowledged. I I feel like this should be understood as a model for today as well.  We will most likely continue to progress and things that we thought at one time to be true will be proven not to be. Things that we thought to be safe can later be shown not to be as well. Take this story as a tale of caution and take knowledge with a grain of salt, because one thing that is proven to be true with time may later be proven to cause "Radium Jaw".

Cited:

http://www.neatorama.com/2013/11/18/The-Strange-Fate-of-Eben-Byers/

http://truecrimerip.tumblr.com/post/132553190908/the-radium-jaw-the-radium-jaw-was-a-common-disease