Tumorigenesis in the U.S. radium luminizers: How unsafe was this occupation

摘要

Dose-response data are presented from the U.S. female workers who were exposed to radium through the painting of luminous dials and who subsequently had their skeletal burdens measured by whole-body counting and radon breath analyses. Lognormal data analyses were done for radium-induced bone sarcomas and head carcinomas after the populations of the respective doses were first determined to be lognormally distributed. The calculated geometric mean and standard deviation for each dose population were used to construct lognormal distributions that subsequently could be used for intercomparisons. To date, a total of 1,391 female luminizers with average estimated skeletal doses below 10 Gy have not shown bone sarcomas or head carcinomas. A primary purpose of this paper is to support the case that (sup 226.228)Ra is one of the radionuclide sources that exemplify in humans a (open quote)threshold(close quotes) dose or a dose below which there should be little concern for tumorigenesis.