Cid_Yama wrote:Right. The high incident of cancer deaths from that generation in my own extended family, is what? An aberration not related to the radioactive elements identified in the bones of their generation showing their exposure? I don't think so.
Easy to connect the dots, which you don't seem to want to do. Radiation exposure causes genetic damage. Not some mystery. You want to argue against that Moron?
The huge mushroom clouds from atom bomb tests of the 1950s and 1960s are an unforgettable part of the American saga. The tests were cloaked in rhetoric typical of the Cold War, i.e. they were needed to achieve “superiority” over the Soviets in the event of a nuclear war.
But all the patriotic nuclear talk couldn’t prevent widespread concern that nuclear war would kill tens of millions. But many were also troubled by fallout in the mushroom clouds, which contained huge amounts of over 100 deadly radioactive chemicals that traveled through the air across the continental U.S. Precipitation brought this fallout back to earth — and into the food chain and human bodies.
Concerns became so great that scientists and citizens began calling for studies of how much fallout was entering people’s bodies, and how much harm it was causing — especially to the highly-sensitive fetuses, infants, and children. Dr. Herman Kalckar of the National Institutes of Health published an article in August 1958, calling for a baby tooth “census” — a program of collecting teeth and testing them in laboratories for fallout levels. In particular, Kalckar suggested that Strontium-90 be measured.
Of the more than 100 radioactive chemicals in fallout, Sr-90 was the most feared. Chemically similar to calcium, it attaches to bone and teeth, where it attacks cells, causing cancer. It can penetrate into the bone marrow, where the red and white blood cells so important to the immune response are formed. In 1956, Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson made a speech singling out the potency of Sr-90:
“This radioactive fallout, as it is called, carries something that’s called strontium-90, which is the most dreadful poison in the world. For only one tablespoon equally shared by all the members of the human race could produce a dangerous level of radioactivity in the bones of every individual.”
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.
During the Cold War in the mid-1940s through early 1960s, the U.S. government conducted about 100 nuclear weapons (atomic bomb) tests in the atmosphere at a test site in Nevada, more than 100 in the Pacific, and one—the first ever—in New Mexico. The radioactive substances released by these tests are known as "fallout." They were carried thousands of miles away from the test site by winds. As a result, people living in the United States at the time of the testing were exposed to varying levels of radiation.
Among the numerous radioactive substances released in fallout, there has been a great deal of concern about and study of one radioactive form of iodine--called iodine-131, or I-131. I-131 collects in the thyroid gland. People exposed to I-131, especially during childhood, may have an increased risk of thyroid disease, including thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer is uncommon and is usually curable. Typically, it is a slow-growing cancer that is highly treatable. About 98 out of 100 people who are diagnosed with thyroid cancer survive the disease for at least five years after diagnosis.
The thyroid controls many body processes, including heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature, as well as childhood growth and development. It is located in the front of the neck, just above the top of the breastbone and overlying the windpipe.
Although the potential of developing thyroid cancer from exposure to I-131 from nuclear weapons testing is small, it is important for Americans who grew up during the atomic bomb testing between 1945 and 1963 to be aware of risks.
How Americans Were Exposed to I-131
Because of wind and rainfall patterns, the distribution of I-131 fallout varied widely after each test. Therefore, although all areas of the United States received fallout from at least one nuclear weapons test, certain areas of North America received more fallout than others.
Scientists estimate that the larger amounts of I-131 from the Nevada test site fell over some parts of Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Montana. But I-131 traveled to all states, particularly those in the Midwestern, Eastern, and Northeastern United States. Some of the I-131 collected on pastures and on grasses. Depending on the location, grazing cows and goats sometimes consumed contaminated grasses resulting in I-131 collecting in the animals' milk. Much of the health risk associated with I-131 occurred among milk-drinkers--usually children. From what is known about thyroid cancer and radiation, scientists think that people who were children during the period of atomic bomb testing are at higher risk for developing thyroid cancer.
The Milk Connection
People younger than 15 at the time of aboveground testing (between 1945 and 1963) who drank milk, and who lived in the Mountain West, Midwestern, Eastern, and Northeastern United States, probably have a higher thyroid cancer risk from exposure to I-131 in fallout than people who lived in other parts of the United States, who were over the age of 15 in the 1940s, or who did not drink milk. Their thyroid glands were still developing during the testing period. And they were more likely to have consumed milk contaminated with I-131. The amount of I-131 people absorbed depends on:
•Their age during the testing period (between 1945 and 1963)
•The amount and source of milk they drank in those years
•Where they lived during the testing period
Age and residence during those years are usually known. But few people can recall the exact amounts or sources of the milk they drank as children. While the amount of milk consumed is important in determining exposure to I-131, it is also important to know the source of the milk. Fresh milk from backyard or farm cows and goats usually contained more I-131 than store-bought milk. This is because processing and shipping milk allowed more time for the I-131 to break down.
Exposure to I-131 can increase the risk of thyroid cancer. It is known that children have a higher-than-average risk of developing thyroid cancer many years later if they were exposed to radiation. This knowledge comes from studies of people exposed to x-ray treatments for childhood cancer or noncancerous head and neck conditions, or as a result of direct radiation from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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.
The earliest concern about health effects from exposure to fallout focused on possible genetic alterations among offspring of the exposed. However, heritable effects of radiation exposure have not been observed from decades of follow-up studies of populations exposed either to medical x rays or to the direct gamma radiation received by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Rather, such studies have demonstrated radiation-related risks of leukemia and thyroid cancer within a decade after exposure, followed by increased risks of other solid tumors in later years. Studies of populations exposed to radioactive fallout also point to increased cancer risk as the primary late health effect of exposure. As studies of biological samples (including bone, thyroid glands and other tissues) have been undertaken, it has become increasingly clear that specific radionuclides in fallout are implicated in fallout-related cancers and other late effects.
It is important to note that, even though the fallout exposures discussed here occurred roughly 50 to 60 years ago, only about half of the predicted total numbers of cancers have been expressed so far. The same can be said of the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the people under study who were exposed to fallout or direct radiation—for example, A-bomb survivors—at very young ages during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are still alive, and the cumulative experience obtained from all studies of radiation-exposed populations is that radiation-related cancers can be expected to occur at any time over the entire lifetime following exposure.
Cid_Yama wrote:No, it is the ingestion of radioactive particles, which the deniers try to gloss over or ignore, that is the problem.
And it is the same people that deny climate change. Someone tell how these same people always end up on the opposite side. If Tobacco was still an issue, the would be on the side of the Tobacco Industry.
It has to be political, as that is the only connection I can see across the different issues. And they are all Republicans. Yes, not all Republicans are deniers, but all deniers are Republicans.
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.
Tanada wrote:
Horse pucky, all the physics science deniers I meet are Democrats like yourself Cid.
diemos wrote:Tanada wrote:
Horse pucky, all the physics science deniers I meet are Democrats like yourself Cid.
Odd. I know plenty of science deniers that are republican religious fundamentalists.
But then I suppose ideologues of any strip react the same way whenever science has to say to them, "No, your cherished and beloved belief does not match reality. Sorry."
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.
pstarr wrote:Tanada wrote:Horse pucky, all the physics science deniers I meet are Democrats like yourself Cid. There is some fundamental disconnect in your thinking process between the fact that I-131 has an 8 day half life and makes up a astonishingly small percentage of weapon test fallout.
Isn't the issue inhaled strontium?
Commenting on the herds of Przewalski's horses, Dr Wood observed: "They seem to have adapted quite well to life within the zone.
"From the images from our cameras, they are clearly moving around in quite large groups," he told BBC News.
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