In December 1958, a group of visionary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, working with the citizen group Committee for Nuclear Information, began collecting baby teeth, locally and across the country. They obtained federal grants to cover their costs, and generated large numbers of volunteers to help with tooth collection. Schools, PTAs, churches, scout groups, dental societies, libraries and clinics all took part. Children were rewarded for donating teeth with a small button bearing a likeness of a boy with a gap in his front teeth, with the phrase "I Gave My Tooth to Science."
A staggering total of about 320,000 teeth were collected over the next dozen years. Lab tests found that children born in 1963 had about 50 times more Sr-90 in teeth than those born in 1950. Washington University officials used their results in testimony to the U.S. Senate leading to the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed by President John F. Kennedy, ending all above-ground atom bomb tests.
Testing had ended, but the thorny question of health hazards to Americans -- especially children -- remained. U.S. childhood cancer rates had climbed in the 1950s and early 1960s, but scientists were stumped as to why. Studies of the fallout-cancer link were only conducted after the Cold War had ended. A 2002 U.S. Centers for Disease Control report calculated that fallout caused 15,000 U.S. cancer deaths, a figure some believed was a gross underestimate. The following year, a blue ribbon European panel reported 61,600,000 cancer deaths worldwide from fallout.
The St. Louis tooth study was seemingly headed for the history books, until 2001, when Washington University officials stumbled upon 85,000 teeth not used in the study in a remote storage area. The school donated the teeth to the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP), a research group conducting its own study of Sr-90 in baby teeth, near U.S. nuclear reactors. Each tooth is enclosed in a small envelope attached to a card identifying the tooth donor.
RPHP scientists recognized that these teeth could help answer the long-awaited question of fallout's harm to the health of Americans. The tooth donors, now in their 40s and 50s, could be tracked at current addresses or through death records. And Sr-90 could still be measured in each tooth, as the chemical decays very slowly.
Earlier this month, the first results of the RPHP health study were released in an article in the International Journal of Health Services. Baby teeth of St. Louis baby boomers who died of cancer by age 50 had more than double -- 122 percent more -- the Sr-90 concentration than did Boomers who are alive and healthy. This research, known as a case-control study, is the first evidence that bomb tests harmed Americans using actual levels of fallout in human bodies. It is not yet possible to estimate the number of cancer victims from fallout, but it appears that the CDC estimate of 15,000 deaths is too low.
There are a number of questions about the Health Project studies with regard to methodology, assumptions, and conclusions. Generally, these studies have not followed good scientific principles. Frequently, they have
- not established control populations for study;
- not examined the impacts of other risk factors;
- used very small sample sizes to draw general conclusions;
- not performed environmental sampling and analysis;
- selectively chosen to ignore data in certain geographic locations or during certain periods of time because they did not “fit”;
- not subjected their data to the independent peer review of the scientific community as a whole; and
- used an incorrect half-life for Sr-90 which gives a false impression that strontium levels in the environment are decaying more rapidly than in baby teeth.
“management failure to fully understand, characterize and control the radiological hazard.” In other words, the cause was human error.
The report continues, “The cumulative effect of inadequacies in ventilation system design and operability compounded by degradation of key safety management programs and safety culture resulted in the release of radiological material from the underground to the environment, and the delayed/ineffective recognition and response to the leak.”
In other words, the cause of the radioactive leak at WIPP was human error.
The human error factor this incident illustrates always poses a danger; it's even more dangerous when human error happens within systems requiring a fail-safe mentality and design. The DOE's 277-page report on the WIPP incident found that poor management and lapses in safety at the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository contributed to the leak.
It’s been reported that the robots sent in to remove the melted fuel rods have died — their wiring fried from the high levels of radiation as soon as they got close to the reactor, rendering them useless. These robots were just unveiled two months ago after two years of development.
Many other efforts have been made to clean up and contain the site. Human workers as well as robot counterparts are there everyday, but so far only 10 percent of the mess has actually been cleaned up. Reactors 2 and 3 are thought to have had partial meltdowns, but Reactor 1 is of the greatest concern. It’s believed that the fuel may have burned through the pressure vessel, fallen to the bottom of the containment vessel and into the concrete pedestal below.
For all species, our statistical models (which included habitat variation; see Supplemental Information) rejected radioactive contamination as an important predictor of mammal density within the PSRER. Although census data do not give direct information on population metrics such as reproductive success or longevity, a scenario in which depressed populations in the highly contaminated areas are supported (on a daily basis) by rapid influx and habitat utilization from less contaminated areas seems highly unlikely. Home ranges of the species examined [6] give length scales smaller than, or of the same order as, route length.
A study of small mammals by Baker et al. [7] also found no evidence of population declines at Chernobyl. However, a previous study of mammals using track counts [3] reported a negative relationship between radiation levels and mammal density. The discrepancy with our data is likely because this previous study [3] covered only 16.1 km of transects examined just once. Our data are derived from transects with a total length that is 20 times larger and repeated in two (21 routes) or three (14 routes) years.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Everyone knows that the dose is critical when you are taking a prescription medication: a small amount can provide significant benefit, but a large dose can kill you. This “non-linear” effect is taken for granted in pharmaceuticals, but is not generally adopted for regulating the risks of radiation. Dr. Edward Calabrese is a professor and toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Department of Environmental Health Sciences. He has spent his career studying non-linear effects in different carcinogens. From hundreds of studies, he has concluded that radiation should be treated more like pharmaceuticals, and regulators needs to change how they think about radiation risks and harm.
What’s the history of the linear-no-threshold, or LNT, framework, and how did it come to be the standard?
The rise of LNT theory was really the result of a political motivation by a group of radiation geneticists. I’m sure they believed that dose response was linear, but they also wanted to scare the hell out of society to increase their stature and grant funding for their research, and they wanted people to think they were the only ones who could save the world from the harms of atomic weapons testings, etc. It was a paternalistic behavior.
pstarr wrote:Sub Tanada, thanks for the good work You helped me see my errors.
Folks need to consider the wolves of Chernobyl. It is a hopeful story, wildlife can return and repopulate a damaged ecology. Then there are healthy human population where natural background radiation is unusually high; Yangjiang China, Kerala India, Guarapari Brazil, and Ramsar in Iran. Folks live normal lives when they are supposed to be mutated and dead. Not so.
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