HELIOLITH

Wired News ran a story today entitled:Nukes Still Take Toll on Workers: One of the victims of Chronic Beryllium Disease (”CBD”) caused by exposure to this element said,

“Bell said when he was hired in 1968 ‘we were told you could eat the stuff and it wouldn’t hurt you.’ Despite the presence of beryllium dust throughout the workplace, Bell said workers were encouraged to eat and drink at their machines.”

Apparently the USDOE is seeking out latent victims (CBD can take 20 years to show itself) to compensate and treat them. Unfortunately, it seems that the danger continues for workers today, as the article ends stating, “Some workers decline to be screened because a positive result would hurt their chances for promotion by making them ineligible to assume duties in areas where beryllium is present.”

Interestingly, a google search on Beryllium returns a http://www.befacts.com/ which was created by the company Brush Wellman to respond to a flurry of negative press about Beryllium, an Element (in the periodic table even) they state is one of their “products” (in one sense it’s counter-intuitive that an element of nature could be a “product”). On their homepage they state:

In recent months we have seen our good name and reputation attacked by reckless reporting about beryllium (one of our products) which alleges we have lost our commitment to value, ignored our promise of quality and have simply stopped caring about our people.

I’m not sure how they would classify this report from Wired magazine, since it doesn’t seem to slander them in any way.

At the same time I think it’s telling that they prefer to characterize CBD as an “allergy” rather than a disease caused by Beryllium. The Wired article (the only other source I have read on the subject so far) reports that, “According to the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, CBD will affect 2 to 6 percent of workers exposed to beryllium, but some tasks put the risk at nearer 20 percent.” I mean, smoking cigarettes increases your odds of getting cancer and emphysemia, but not everyone who smokes does develop those diseases. Granted, the odds are invariable worse for a cigarette smoker to get cancer than for a Beryllium-exposed worker to develop CBD, but big tobacco is still required to report that smoking CAUSES cancer. Take for example this from Phillip Morris

Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no safe cigarette.

It’s odd that the “befacts.com” site doesn’t quickly define safe exposure (if such a meaure even is known) but rather the “using Be materials safely” link is external, leading back to a complex drop-down menu that link to .pdf documents of msds sheets and the like.