Bob Masta said:
[...]
But there is a new and better reason to avoid tungsten:
It is *extremely* carcinogenic. A tiny fleck stuck in your
skin can cause cancer. (Well, it does in lab animals.
If any creationists out there don't think they share any
common ancestry with rats and mice, by all means go
ahead and experiment on yourself to provide some
data points for humans.)
[...]
Cor strewth!.
Had me worried there, with the amount of Tungsten Carbide tooling I use.
Looked on the web and could not find any carcinogeneic effects for Tungsten.
You're weren't by any chance thinking of depleted Uranium, Tungsten
penetrators by any chance?
Nope, tungsten slivers. Saw it in Science News last year.
A search on "Tungsten Cancer" turns up several hits,
including:
www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050319/note13ref.asp
Just dredged up the original Science News article from my dead-tree
archives: The tests were on an alloy that was 91 percent
tungsten, with cobalt and nickel, commonly used in
bullets as a replacement for uranium and/or lead.
Pellets were surgically implanted in rat leg muscles.
Some groups of rats got other metals (nickel or tantalum).
Within 5 months, all animals getting tungsten were dead
from cancer that had spread to their lungs. Tantalum caused
no problems; nickel caused fatal cancers at the wound sites,
but did not spread to the lungs. The findings were to be
reported in "Environmental Health Perspectives".
Research was conducted by John F. Kalinich at the
Armed Forces Radiology Research Institute in Bethesda, MD.
Best regards,
Bob Masta
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