Shipyard Disaster

"Leprosy!" was the rumor when 19 employes of California Shipbuilding Corp. at Los Angeles developed gruesome sores on their hands and feet, and some had to have fingers and hands cut off. At least one man seemed certain to lose a foot.

One day last month the 19 "lepers" were told that doctors had at last figured out what was wrong: they were suffering from X-ray burns. Here & there a wife wept quietly. But most of the men felt better at once, though they were victims' of the most tragic blunder in U.S. industrial medicine.

The trouble began almost a year ago. When workmen with injured hands reported to the shipyard hospital, attendants allowed them to put their hands or feet into an X-ray machine and watch the waggling shadows of their bones on a fluoroscopic screen. X-rays are literally death rays which kill flesh when too powerful or upon prolonged exposure. Apparently the workmen X-rayed themselves for several minutes. Skilled X-ray technicians limit exposure to only a few seconds.

When burns slowly developed on the men's fingers in the next few weeks, a shipyard doctor told the men they had "fungus growths." When they began to lose fingers and suffer dreadful pain, the leprosy rumor started.

Meanwhile the shipyard's chief doctor has had a nervous breakdown, another doctor has been fired. The 19 maimed workmen will probably collect at least $165,000 in disability compensation. Their X-ray burns, though they may seem to be cured, may break out again any time as long as the men live.

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