Fwd: Rachel #691: THE MAJOR CAUSE OF CANCER--PART 1

[Joel Baumbaugh <baumbaug@nosc.mil>]

         I receive this electronic version of RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH 
WEEKLY and have always been somewhat amused at its inflammatory rhetoric, 
half-truths and barely veiled threats of disaster - usually at the expense 
of some company producing a food additive, herbicide or pesticide.  This 
article hit a little closer to home!  Their email address is below if you 
have a comment to make...

         Joel Baumbaugh (baumbaug@nosc.mil)
         SSC-SD


>=======================Electronic Edition========================
>.                                                               .
>.           RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #691           .
>.                     ---March 16, 2000---                      .
>.                          HEADLINES:                           .
>.               THE MAJOR CAUSE OF CANCER--PART 1               .
>.                          ==========                           .
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>=================================================================
>
>
>THE MAJOR CAUSE OF CANCER--PART 1
>
>[Rachel's will be published next on April 13.]
>
>When Wilhelm Roentgen first discovered X-rays, in 1895, "doctors
>and physicians saw the practical potential of X-rays at once, and
>rushed to experiment with them."[1,pg.7] Many physicians built
>their own X-ray equipment, with mixed results: some home-brew
>X-ray machines produced no radiation whatsoever, others produced
>enough to irradiate everyone in the next room.
>
>The ability to see inside the human body for the first time was a
>marvelous, mysterious and deeply provocative discovery. Roentgen
>trained X-rays on his wife's hand for 15 minutes, producing a
>macabre image of the bones of her hand adorned by her wedding
>ring. Roentgen's biographer, Otto Glasser, says Mrs. Roentgen
>"could hardly believe that this bony hand was her own and
>shuddered at the thought that she was seeing her skeleton. To
>Mrs. Roentgen, as to many others later, this experience gave a
>vague premonition of death," Glasser wrote.[1,pg.4]
>
>Within a year, by 1896, physicians were using X-rays for
>diagnosis and as a new way of gathering evidence to protect
>themselves against malpractice suits. Almost immediately --
>during 1895-96 -- it also became clear that X-rays could cause
>serious medical problems. Some physicians received burns that
>wouldn't heal, requiring amputation of their fingers. Others
>developed fatal cancers.
>
>At that time, antibiotics had not yet been discovered, so
>physicians had only a small number of treatments they could offer
>their patients; X-rays gave them a range of new procedures that
>were very "high tech" -- bordering on the miraculous -- and which
>seemed to hold out promise to the sick. Thus the medical world
>embraced these mysterious, invisible rays with great enthusiasm.
>Understandably, physicians at the time often thought they
>observed therapeutic benefits where controlled experiments today
>find none.
>
>At that time -- just prior to 1920 -- the editor of AMERICAN
>X-RAY JOURNAL said "there are about 100 named diseases that yield
>favorably to X-ray treatment." In her informative history of the
>technology, MULTIPLE EXPOSURES; CHRONICLES OF THE RADIATION AGE,
>Catherine Caufield (see REHW #200, #201, #202), comments on this
>period: "Radiation treatment for benign [non-cancer] diseases
>became a medical craze that lasted for 40 or more
>years."[1,pg.15] "...[L]arge groups of people [were] needlessly
>irradiated for such minor problems as ringworm and acne.... Many
>women had their ovaries irradiated as a treatment for
>depression."[1,pg.15] Such uses of X-rays would today be viewed
>as quackery, but many of them were accepted medical practice into
>the 1950s. Physicians weren't the only ones enthusiastic about
>X-ray therapies. If you get a large enough dose of X-rays your
>hair falls out, so "beauty shops installed X-ray equipment to
>remove their customers' unwanted facial and body hair," Catherine
>Caufield reports.[1,pg.15]
>
>Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 led directly to Henri
>Becquerel's discovery of the radioactivity of uranium in 1896 and
>then to the discovery of radium by Marie Curie and her husband
>Pierre in 1898, for which Becquerel and the Curies were jointly
>awarded the Nobel prize in 1903. (Twenty years later Madame Curie
>would die of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.)
>
>Soon radioactive radium was being prescribed by physicians
>alongside X-rays. Radium treatments were prescribed for heart
>trouble, impotence, ulcers, depression, arthritis, cancer, high
>blood pressure, blindness and tuberculosis, among other ailments.
>Soon radioactive toothpaste was being marketed, then radioactive
>skin cream. In Germany, chocolate bars containing radium were
>sold as a "rejuvenator."[1,pg.28] In the U.S, hundreds of
>thousands of people began drinking bottled water laced with
>radium, as a general elixir known popularly as "liquid sunshine."
>As recently as 1952 LIFE magazine wrote about the beneficial
>effects of inhaling radioactive radon gas in deep mines. Even
>today The Merry Widow Health Mine near Butte, Montana and the
>Sunshine Radon Health Mine nearby advertise that visitors to the
>mines report multiple benefits from inhaling radioactive
>radon,[2] even though numerous studies now indicate that the only
>demonstrable health effect of radon gas is lung cancer.
>
>Thus the medical world and popular culture together embraced
>X-rays (and other radioactive emanations) as miraculous remedies,
>gifts to humanity from the foremost geniuses of an inventive age.
>
>In the popular imagination, these technologies suffered a serious
>setback when atomic bombs were detonated over Japan in 1945. Even
>though the A-bombs arguably shortened WW II and saved American
>lives, John Hersey's description of the human devastation in
>HIROSHIMA forever imprinted the mushroom cloud in the popular
>mind as an omen of unutterable ruin. Despite substantial efforts
>to cast The Bomb in a positive light, radiation technology would
>never recover the luster it had gained before WW II.
>
>Seven years after A-bombs were used in war, Dwight Eisenhower set
>the U.S. government on a new course, intended to show the world
>that nuclear weapons, radioactivity and radiation were not
>harbingers of death but were in fact powerful, benign servants
>offering almost-limitless benefits to humankind. The "Atoms for
>Peace" program was born, explicitly aimed at convincing Americans
>and the world that these new technologies were full of hope, and
>that nuclear power reactors should be developed with tax dollars
>to generate electricity. The promise of this newest technical
>advance seemed too good to be true -- electricity "too cheap to
>meter."[3]
>
>The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created the civilian Atomic Energy
>Commission but as a practical matter the nation's top military
>commanders maintained close control over the development of all
>nuclear technologies.[4]
>
>Thus by a series of historical accidents, all of the major
>sources of ionizing radiation fell under the purview of people
>and institutions who had no reason to want to explore the early
>knowledge that radiation was harmful. In 1927, Hermann J. Muller
>had demonstrated that X-rays caused inheritable genetic damage,
>and he received a Nobel prize for his efforts. However, he had
>performed his experiments on fruit flies and it was easy, or at
>least convenient, to dismiss his findings as irrelevant to
>humans.
>
>In sum, to physicians, radiation seemed a promising new therapy
>for treating nearly every ailment under the sun; for the military
>and the Joint Commmission on Atomic Energy in Congress it
>unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars, a veritable flood of
>taxpayer funds, most of which came with almost no oversight
>because of official secrecy surrounding weapons development; and
>for private-sector government contractors like Union Carbide,
>Monsanto Chemical Co., General Electric, Bechtel Corporation,
>DuPont, Martin Marietta and others -- it meant an opportunity to
>join the elite "military-industrial complex" whose growing
>political power President Eisenhower warned against in his final
>address to Congress in 1959.
>
>Throughout the 1950s the military detonated A-bombs above-ground
>at the Nevada Test Site, showering downwind civilian populations
>with radioactivity.[5] At the Hanford Reservation in Washington
>state, technicians intentionally released huge clouds of
>radioactivity to see what would happen to the human populations
>thus exposed. In one Hanford experiment 500,000 Curies of
>radioactive iodine were released; iodine collects in the human
>thyroid gland. The victims of this experiment, mostly Native
>Americans, were not told about it for 45 years.[6,pg.96] American
>sailors on ships and soldiers on the ground were exposed to large
>doses of radioactivity just to see what would happen to them. The
>military brass insisted that being showered with radiation is
>harmless. In his autobiography, Karl Z. Morgan, who served as
>radiation safety director at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
>(Clinton, Tennessee) from 1944 to 1971, recalls that, "The
>Veterans Administration seems always on the defensive to make
>sure the victims are not compensated."[6,pg.101] Morgan recounts
>the story of John D. Smitherman, a Navy man who received large
>doses of radiation during A-bomb experiments on Bikini Atoll in
>1946. Morgan writes, "The Veterans Administration denied any
>connection to radiation exposure until 1988, when it had awarded
>his widow benefits. By the time of his death, Smitherman's body
>was almost consumed by cancers of the lung, bronchial lymph
>nodes, diaphragm, spleen, pancreas, intestines, stomach, liver,
>and adrenal glands. In 1989, a year after it had awarded the
>benefits, the VA revoked them from Smitherman's widow."[6,pg.101]
>
>Starting in the 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, thousands of
>uranium miners were told that breathing radon gas in the uranium
>mines of New Mexico was perfectly safe. Only now are the
>radon-caused lung cancers being tallied up, as the truth leaks
>out 50 years too late.
>
>In retrospect, a kind of nuclear mania swept the industrial
>world. What biotechnology and high-tech computers are today,
>atomic technology was in the 1950s and early 1960s. Government
>contractors spent billions to develop a nuclear-powered airplane
>-- even though simple engineering calculations told them early in
>the project that such a plane would be too heavy to carry a
>useful cargo.[4,pg.204] Monsanto Research Corporation proposed a
>plutonium-powered coffee pot that would boil water for 100 years
>without a refueling.[4,pg.227] A Boston company proposed
>cufflinks made of radioactive uranium for the simple reason that
>uranium is heavier than lead and "the unusual weight prevents
>cuffs from riding up."[4,pg.227]
>
>In 1957, the Atomic Energy Commission established its Plowshare
>Division -- named of course for the Biblical "swords into
>plowshares" phrasing in Isaiah (2:4).[4,pg.231] Our government
>and its industrial partners were determined to show the world
>that this technology was benign, no matter what the facts might
>be. On July 14, 1958, Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the
>H-bomb, arrived in Alaska to announce Project Chariot, a plan to
>carve a new harbor out of the Alaska coast by detonating up to
>six H-bombs. After a tremendous political fight -- documented in
>Dan O'Neill's book, THE FIRECRACKER BOYS[7] -- the plan was
>shelved. Another plan was developed to blast a new canal across
>Central America with atomic bombs, simply to give the U.S. some
>leverage in negotiating with Panama over control of the Panama
>Canal. That plan, too, was scrapped. In 1967, an A-bomb was
>detonated underground in New Mexico, to release natural gas
>trapped in shale rock formations. Trapped gas was in fact
>released, but -- as the project's engineers should have been able
>to predict -- the gas turned out to be radioactive so the hole in
>the ground was plugged and a bronze plaque in the desert is all
>that remains visible of Project Gasbuggy.[4,pg.236]
>
>In sum, according to NEW YORK TIMES columnist H. Peter Metzger,
>the Atomic Energy Commission wasted billions of dollars on
>"crackpot schemes," all for the purpose of proving that nuclear
>technology is beneficial and not in any way harmful.[4,pg.237]
>
>The Plowshare Division may have been a complete failure, but one
>lasting result emerged from all these efforts: A powerful culture
>of denial sunk deep roots into the heart of scientific and
>industrial America.
>
>[To be continued April 13.]
>
>Descriptor terms: radiation; nuclear weapons; nuclear power;
>x-rays; cancer; carcinogens; karl z. morgan; downwinders;
>nevada test site; hanford;
>
>==============
>[1] Catherine Caufield, MULTIPLE EXPOSURES; CHRONICLES OF THE
>RADIATION AGE (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). ISBN 0-06-015900-6.
>
>[2] Jim Robbins, "Camping Out in the Merry Widow Mine," HIGH
>COUNTRY NEWS Vol. 26, No. 12 (June 27, 1994), pgs. unknown. See
>http://www.hcn.org/1994/jun27/dir/reporters.html. And see
>http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/MTBASradon.html
>
>[3] Arjun Makhijani and Scott Saleska, THE NUCLEAR POWER
>DECEPTION; U.S. NUCLEAR MYTHOLOGY FROM ELECTRICITY "TOO CHEAP TO
>METER" TO "INHERENTLY SAFE" REACTORS (New York: The Apex Press,
>1999). ISBN 0-945257-75-9.
>
>[4] H. Peter Metzger, THE ATOMIC ESTABLISHMENT (New York: Simon &
>Schuster, 1972). ISBN 671-21351-2.
>
>[5] Michael D'Antonio, ATOMIC HARVEST (New York: Crown
>Publishers, 1993). ISBN 0-517-58981-8. And: Chip Ward, Canaries
>on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West (New York: Verso, 1999).
>ISBN 1859847501.
>
>[6] Karl Z. Morgan and Ken M. Peterson, THE ANGRY GENIE; ONE
>MAN'S WALK THROUGH THE NUCLEAR AGE (Norman, Oklahoma: University
>of Oklahoma Press, 1999). ISBN 0-8061-3122-5.
>
>[7] Dan O'Neill, THE FIRECRACKER BOYS (New York: St. Martin's
>Press, 1994). ISBN 0-312-13416-9.
>
>
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