New Documents Show Increased Cancer Risk For Baby Boomers After Nuclear Testing

Politics Daily:

Even with a half century's hindsight, the U.S. government's willingness to risk the health of the nation's children seems somewhere between unfathomable and unconscionable.

Between 1951 and 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated more than 100 nuclear bombs in the atmosphere over its Nevada Test Site, just 65 miles from Las Vegas.

Read the whole story: Politics Daily

Comments

[gunnergoz]

I thought it was interesting that the article mention Dr. Edward Teller's refusal to accept that radiation fallout could possibly have harmful effects upon humans. His argument exactly parallels and predicted the argument that the global warming naysayers use today: "The planet's too big, we can't calculate all the inputs that affect it and man's input is by far the least critical."

Now, 50 years later, we know full well the dangers of nuclear fallout...but will we still be around in 50 years to see the results of unrestrained global warming? And if so, what kind of a world will our descendants be left to live in?

[TJCole]

I'm a registered nuclear survivor with The NEA......so much for Teller's insanity and bovine scatology..!

[TJCole]

Really no kidding that's why I had two bone cancer operations on my right leg, and was lucky to have kept it at all..!

Osteo Chodomas, were tell tail of radiation exposure they were very common for us who were nuked as kids by our own Government and our Defense Department..the worst killer was the 1 Megaton above ground blast they called Big Bertha in 1954 1 Megaton that 1 million tons of TNT in blast alone not t mention the gamma rays and radiation...!

Now with 100 blasts, 100 nukes blasted off not just in Nevada either but elsewhere some in the south east we radiated our entire nation and all those kids growing up who now suffer cancers and others diseases related to this nightmare attack upon We The People...by our Defense Department and Presidents who allowed this..!

If you grew up on the east coast and spent time at the sea or beach or shore you got a bigger dose than others in the mid-west as these radioactive particles rose up to the jet stream and then traveled east to the sea where they then became heavier and charged more positive and settled at the beaches and shore regions due to ionization...

I know of many not as lucky as me who have died from bone cancer around my age or lost their legs as did Ted Kennedy's son...

[javaz]

Great.
Another excuse to cancel insurance for pre-existing conditions.

[TJCole]

Maybe that's why they won't give us decent Health Care alright, they know already They Killed Us..!

[FZliveson]

The article claims to be "statistically significant" without giving any real data. Who is willing to be scared by ex-post-facto terror from a 53-year-old executive director of a small anti-nuclear Radiation and Public Health Project? What are the overall statistics on "cancer" deaths in the 1947-1965 generation? Those would be statistically significant.

I went through school in the "duck and cover" era and, having lived through that real U.S. Government created terror, I am unwilling to produce the stress necessary to once again worry about my health over the strontium 90 that was in the calf growth fluid I poured on my cereal then. The stress today would be as dangerous as the crap from the air or the milk.

[quantumspin]

And remember the kids back in those days in midwest and southern states on bikes near dusk, riding behind the mosquito spraying trucks--it was DDT. I lived near a major oil refinery complex---about 15 miles away---and all summer, the sky was lead gray and the air had that great hydrocarbon smell to it day and night in my little town. As a college undergraduate, I went to a seminar where the major electric company that ran several large oil and coal fired power plants in my state told students that the answer to pollution from power plants was to make the stacks much much taller.

We're not much smarter today actually, or much more committed to a healthy country. Melamine in food, junk in the water, cell phone radiation. E-coli in beef that goes unchecked---where the test for it seems to be when people get sick or paralyzed. When I moved years later to North Carolina, a joke I was told said that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, but the problem was that M&M's did.

[unwashedmasses]

Great news! Another poison:(

Seriously, you forgot the DDT.

Many of us who were born in the 1950s have excessive/toxic levels.

Mine was considered toxic; in 1998, my levels were STILL considered half-toxic, nearly 40 years later.

Like I said, GREAT news.

[tbone99]

I know this is somewhat tangential but does anyone here remember in the fifties how shoe stores used to have machines that would XRAY your feet to see if the shoes fit?!!! I used to love that machine.

Any epidemic of foot cancer noted in this demographic?

[unwashedmasses]

I remember those. What stupidity we had.

[FZliveson]

I remember them. Much less chance for cancer than mutated gonads which were right in the path of the x-rays!

[motoGpifupleez]

And just who will be the happiest with these findings? The health insurance industry of course!
Your place of birth is now going to be "pre-existing condition".
The most favorite words in the insurance world? "CLAIM DENIED"

[ohmetoo]

that Baby Boomers face because of these long-ago atmospheric tests. Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano analyzed the lingering radiation in infant teeth (donated long ago by the parents of baby boys born in the St. Louis area between 1959 and 1961) and compared the results to contemporary cancer data from the subjects. "What we found out was shocking,"

No wonder the HEALTH insurance companies are fighting so hard, the radiation poisoned Baby Boomers are headed to an age where they will need an inordinate amount of cancer treatments!

[Montanagramma]

You would think the ins companies would want the public option, so they could dump those problems on the government programs. Actually, though, maybe that is where it should be, since the government decisions of long ago could have created, or at least made worse the problem.

[Artos]

How in the world will they manage that when they themselves are just as apt to have been contaminated. There isn't one place in the U.S. that didn't get radiated. Recall during the Clinton Administration that a woman whose last name was Ireland I think , who had released information about how much of the U.S. had received radiation during those years. A map showing the extent of contamination was published in our newspaper. Well I still have that map. There is no part of the U.S. that didn't get some of it. I just feel fortunate that I wasn't born in the U.S. and that my mom believed in breast feeding. When I arrived in the U.S. in 1956 I was already 4 and a half. I probably missed the worst part of it. The whole thing is really ironic and sort of hysterically funny. The Government in order to "Protect" Americans and their way of Life probably did more to kill them all. My God but humans are stupid.

[MadHeart]

Not a few people have died from industrial pollution as well, and still are. I'm convinced my mother, who died in 1948, aged 28, of kidney disease and cervical cancer and not treated until a few weeks before her death (much too late, as I remember her bouts of fainting and illness for about a year), was affected by her job with Union Carbide, making batteries for WWII use. "Black lung", "brown lung", asbestos, lead, and chemical poisoning affected more people and caused more deaths than was ever acknowledged. And did we really learn very much from Chernobyl? After all, I remember a friend whose brother was a welder at a now-aging nuclear plant about 10 mi from us, a brother who was a very heavy pot smoker, both on and off the job, as were many of his co-workers involved in building that plant in the 70s. Makes me shudder to think about it.

[BlackBuddha]

bomb bomb bomb,
bomb bomb Vegas...

[Nora-Charles]

We lived in fear for years of being nuked by somebody else during the Cold War -- when all the time we were bombing ourselves.

[kesmarn]

Well said. A comparable comparison is the fact that the 9/11 attacks failed to destroy the American financial system, but Wall Street sabotaged itself from within, a lot more effectively.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

[ResearchtheFacts]

Man is his own worst enemy.

[Rand]

Pogo lives!

[jws2346]

Welp, I wouldn't come completely unglued. They're only talking about the 100 or so documented cases, not the "hum.., let me try this first before we make fools of ourselves with a dudder" I'm sorry to say it, but this is just another case of "the heck with that big iceberg, full speed ahead" and the scientists didn't know all the bad effects it might have on humans and the Pols didn't care. We's was at cold war

[fumes]

my desk saved me..

all you needed was a wooden desk to hide under and you were safe!

[motoboy]

Our government always gets a pass when it is "trying" to do something to "save" us.

It's the same right now with the Iraq and Obghanistan wars. Our government causes most of the terrorism that we are threatened with, then says, "We have to go to war to protect you."

We need to look thru what the government wants to do (usually for business reasons) and tell them NO occasionally.

[CatHead]

50 years later we are asking were the radioactive fissionable materials from atmospheric testing went. They went into the atmosphere and then into some people's lungs and onto their skin.

Didn't help that generation to be fueled by nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, saturated fats, simple sugars, salt, and food additives.

Geez, sounds a lot like this generation minus the smog from leaded gasoline.