And Now, Cadmium

Before killing herself in 1969, Takako Nakamura wrote: "The pains gnaw at my body. I want to throw out my stomach and intestines." Read aloud to Japan's hushed Diet last month, those words moved Prime Minister Eisaku Sato to tears. Takako Nakamura has become a symbol of the tragic results of Japan's unchecked pollution.

At 18, Takako became a lathe operator at a cadmium smelter near her home in Annaka, a city on the main island of Honshu. When she began suffering mysterious pains in 1961, no one even thought to blame cadmium. As protection against the toxic metal, which is widely used for electroplating, she wore special rubber clothing. Doctors diagnosed her ailment as "intestinal ulcers." But even eight years after she switched to clerical work, the pain continued. Two summers ago, it got so bad that Takako, 28, leaped from a speeding train and into a river.

By then, other Japanese were complaining of a strange disease called, for lack of a medical term, itai-itai (ouch-ouch). Seeking clues, health officials finally exhumed Takako's body last month and performed an autopsy. The results shocked the nation. By current Japanese standards, a reading of one part per million of cadmium is harmful to humans. Takako's liver contained 4,540 p.p.m., her kidneys 22,400 p.p.m. Scientists speculated that she breathed cadmium particles and fumes generated by the plant's smelting process, and pointed out that a major symptom of such poisoning, decalcification of bones, is not detectable by X ray until the bones have lost about 30% of their calcium.

Spirit and Suicide. Prime Minister Sato has ordered health checks on all workers in the more than 1,000 Japanese plants that use cadmium--a crucial step, since only a handful of those plants take adequate safety precautions. Last week health officials reported that cadmium has tainted much of the country's rice. Farmers around Takako's city of Annaka, for example, have been urged to stop raising wheat and Chinese cabbages; samples have been found to contain as much as 17.8 p.p.m. of cadmium.

"The human body has functions to discharge foreign wastes," declared Masuo Araki, chairman of the National Public Safety Commission, in a recent speech that startled his audience. "We must have the spirit to eat contaminated rice." But in Nagano City, the owner of a paint factory was so depressed over the cadmium scare that he committed suicide. "I would like to stop using cadmium," he said in a farewell note, "but I cannot. I am assuming full responsibility and choosing death." Some U.S. scientists now rank cadmium ahead of lead as a dangerous pollutant. It is a prime candidate for a list of toxic substances that the federal Environmental Protection Agency will publish this month and for which it will set emission limits.

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