From: Archibald Scatflinger (transdimensionalelf@hawaii.rr.com)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 18:59:37 MDT
> > >
> > > If the whole of the middle east, including Israel, suddenly
disappeared
> > > under a beastly large H-Bomb mushroom cloud, I'd sleep like a baby
that
> > > night, thankful for a more peaceful world.
"America has been scourged by terrorist attacks because of its often
heavy-handed interventions abroad, not because Muslims hate democracy or
McDonald's."
Columnist Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun
http://www.downwinders.org/lunacy.htm
Study: 1950s nuclear fallout worse than thought
March 1, 2002 Posted: 1:56 PM EST (1856 GMT)
TAKOMA PARK, Maryland (CNN) -- Radioactive fallout from 1950s above-ground
nuclear weapons testing spread farther than researchers previously realized
and most increased cancer rates in the United States, according to a
scientific report.
"Any person living in the contiguous United States since 1951 has been
exposed to radioactive fallout, and all organs and tissues of the body have
received some radiation exposure," the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the National Cancer Institute said in a progress report
prepared for Congress. The report was reviewed by the Institute for Energy
and Environmental Research.
The preliminary report -- the actual study is not yet complete -- has
alarmed some members of Congress, including Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. "What
we know is maybe the tip of the iceberg here," Harkin said. "We know that
there's been upwards of perhaps 15,000 deaths that are attributable to these
nuclear tests." Congress received the preliminary report last August.
More than 2,000 nuclear tests have been conducted worldwide since the first
nuclear bomb was built in the Manhattan Project in World War II, but the
CDC/NCI study considered only those above-ground tests that took place
between 1951 and 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union agreed in 1963
to restrict nuclear tests to underground sites.
"What is surprising and very new is that it has created intense hot spots in
the continental United States all the way from California and Washington to
Vermont, New Hampshire and North Carolina," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani,
president of the IEER.
And yet, the government has yet to formulate a public health response,
according to IEER outreach director Lisa Ledwidge, a biologist. She noted
that officials in the 1950s notified suppliers of photographic film of
expected fallout patterns so they could protect their film, but did not
share the information with milk producers, for example.
A 1997 report by the National Cancer Institute, which dealt with only one
radionuclide -- iodine-131 -- indicated that "farm children ... who drank
goat's milk in the 1950s in high fallout areas were as severely exposed as
the worst exposed children after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident,"
Makhijani said.
The IEER called for the government to expand its compensation program for
test site "downwinders" to include hot spots thousands of miles from the
test sites themselves, and to formulate and implement a comprehensive
response to the public health threat posed by the fallout. Harkin agreed.
"People have a right to know if they were exposed where the big areas of
fallout were and they need to be screened and told what to do to protect
their health," the senator said.
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