Journal mcgrew's Journal: Radioactive Snow, Radioactive Teeth 5
Back in the 1950s they tested atomic bombs above ground, and even on US soil in Nevada.
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but I do remember one Nevada test in particular, because it snowed in St. Louis a day or two later; I lived across the river in Cahokia. This was the strangest snowstorm I've ever seen, and haven't seen one like it since.
It had lightning and thunder. The next day there was two or three feet of snow on the ground, and the authorities urged parents to not let their kids play in it, because that particular weather system carried radioactive fallout from Nevada, which was assumed dumped on the St Louis area in the snow.
We all played in the snow anyway. This was back in primitive times before bicycle helmets and seat belts and air bags and so forth. Plus, parents simply didn't believe the authorities; how could snow be harmful?
A few years later, science asked us for our teeth. They got at least one of mine.
They were doing a study of stronium-90, a radioactive component of fallout. I never heard anything more about it until this morning when I read the St. Louis Post Dispatch. It seems that a study was done at Washington University comparing cancer rates with radioactive teeth. The results weren't surprising, but it was said the study was flawed.
The teeth resurfaced in 2001, and they studied again. The findings? Same as the Wash U findings - radioactive fallout causes cancer. And it turned out that the radioactive snow wasn't much of a problem, but radioactive milk was.
The new study is a spinoff of the St. Louis Tooth Survey, in which more than 300,000 kids sent their teeth to the Greater St. Louis Citizens Committee for Nuclear Information. Washington University scientists analyzed most of the teeth for strontium-90, which was created by the bomb blasts and absorbed by the teeth and bones of infants.
They suspected that the children were exposed by drinking milk from cows and goats that grazed on grass contaminated by fallout. They called it the "milk pathway."
The study concluded that St. Louis children born in 1964 had about 50 times more strontium-90 in their baby teeth than those born in 1950, before the start of atomic testing in Nevada.
Milk is bad for you. At least, it is when the cows producing the milk eat radioactive grass.
Of the 85,000 teeth found in storage, 6,340 teeth met the new study's criteria, which included the children being bottle-fed as infants. Project officials were able to track down addresses for 2,703 of those donors.
Through surveys, they were able to isolate 97 teeth from 77 donors with cancer and compare them to 194 teeth from healthy donors.
Of the healthy donors, levels of strontium-90 were insignificant, the research shows. But the donors who died of cancer had about 122 percent more of the isotope in their teeth than the healthy donors.
I never did much like milk, but I smoked cigarettes for thirty years. My younger sister never smoked, but she always loved milk.
I wonder which one of us will die of cancer first?
Your sister (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My uncle died of lung cancer thirty years after he quit smoking. So, yeah, you're right.
You reminded me of a song done by my old band (Score:2)
Around 1990. It was called "You, Me and Stronium 90".
Too much Spiders from Mars and Roxy Music.
I re-wrote it later as "You, Me and Polysorbate 80" - but never got to perform it live this way.
We are all dying, right now. In one door, and out another.
Thundersnow (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you were alive then, it was probbaly the same storm. I never saw so much snow in one pile in my life. Drifts reached some people's roofs.