Nuclear Testing and the Rise of Thyroid Cancers

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/alvarez10152010.html


The Public Was Never Warned About the Risks


According to a recent New York Times article, thyroid cancer in the U.S. has been on the rise for nearly 40 years.

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With a half-life of 8.5 days, Iodine-131 rapidly contaminates air, vegetation and milk supplies. Because it is absorbed mostly in the body's thyroid, radioactive iodine has been linked to thyroid cancer and other types of thyroid damage in humans for several decades. It takes about 90 days for the radioactivity of I-131 to diminish to very small levels. Thyroid cancer can have a latency period as long as 38 years.

According to the National Cancer Institute in 1992, about 150 million curies of radioactive iodine was released in open air from nuclear testing in Nevada, causing heavy contamination of the nation's milk supplies from the early 1950's to the early 1960's. This is more than 20 times the amount estimated to have been released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. At the time of open air testing, millions of children were drinking this contaminated milk.

In the early 1950s when radioactive fallout was over-exposing film in cardboard made with contaminated straw, the Eastman Kodak company secretly complained and was given routine warnings by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The public was never warned by the U.S. government about the dangers of consuming milk it was contaminating in its quest to amass a nuclear arsenal.

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With trust in the U.S. government sinking like a stone, it's time for greater transparency about the price paid for nuclear weapons. As former Senator John Glenn (D-OH), a staunch supporter of the military, warned, "What good is it to protect ourselves with nuclear weapons, if we poison our people in the process?"

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John had it right

[stray cat]

1. better detection of thyroid cancers -some that will never be life threatening

the key now is to discover which ones should include surgery and which can be left largely alone

[ensho]

2. Cuban medicine is very up on this problem

having dealth with Russian children which they treated and still treat

[CreekDog]

3. are you denying the downwinders suffered any greater rate of ill effects?

Scott Matheson, 61, Ex-Governor And Leading Democrat in Utah
By GLENN FOWLER
Published: October 08, 1990

Scott M. Matheson, Governor of Utah from 1977 to 1985, died yesterday at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center in Salt Lake City. He was 61 years old and lived in Salt Lake City.

He died of bone marrow cancer, his family said.

His mother and several aunts, uncles and cousins had died of cancer, and he was particularly concerned about the effects of radiation on health. He vigorously opposed a proposal to put a high-level nuclear waste repository in southern Utah.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/08/obituaries/scott-matheson-61-ex-governor-and-leading-democrat-in-utah.html?pagewanted=1

(he was a downwinder too)