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TFP update article, E Magazine
Mark Graffis wrote:
> Baby teeth studies reveal childhood radiation exposure
>
> Friday, September 13, 2002
>
> By Joni Praded, E/The Environmental Magazine
>
> The discovery came last spring. Some Washington University researchers
> were wading through a musty old ammunition bunker at Missouri's Tyson
> Research Center, doing some cleaning.
>
> There they stumbled across a bizarre find: hundreds of boxes
> containing baby teeth. Each tooth was accompanied by a card carrying
> details of the child who lost it. There were 85,000 teeth in all, and
> stumped university administrators nearly discarded them.
>
> Luckily, they didn't; the cached teeth turned out to be a scientific
> treasure trove. Over the next few years, they will give researchers
> the rare chance to measure how radiation levels in children's bodies
> affect their health in later life.
>
> The teeth were unused specimens from the St. Louis Baby-Tooth Survey,
> a massive public health study mobilized by scientist and antinuclear
> activist Barry Commoner from 1958 to 1970.
>
> The United States had been conducting above-ground nuclear weapons
> tests, setting off about 100 bombs in the American West in the years
> following World War II. Radioactive fallout was increasingly detected
> in milk supplies and in the environment, and the public was growing
> uneasy about how much radiation might be accumulating in their own
> bodies and what ills it might spur.
>
> Researchers working on the survey collected some 300,000 baby teeth
> from children in the St. Louis area to see if strontium-90 (a
> carcinogenic radioactive agent) was accumulating in their bodies. They
> found that the amount of strontium-90 in those teeth rose dramatically
> during bomb-test periods and fell dramatically after testing ceased.
> This helped spur the United States to sign the 1963 treaty banning
> atmospheric bomb tests.
>
> TRACKING THE BABIES
>
> But what happened to those St. Louis children later in life? Did their
> exposure lead to high cancer rates or other illnesses? No one knows,
> but Joe Mangano and his colleagues at the New York-based Radiation and
> Public Health Project (RPHP) now have the opportunity to find out.
>
> The 85,000-tooth goldmine has been shipped to RPHP's lab, the only
> place in the United States currently measuring the level of radiation
> in people's bodies. (The U.S. government hasn't funded such research
> in nearly 20 years.)
>
> These modern-day tooth fairies test fallen teeth from children born
> near nuclear power plants. And like their predecessors, their aim is
> to find out how much strontium-90 resides in these children's bodies
> and what impact it has on them. Says Mangano, the St. Louis teeth have
> provided an opportunity to follow the medical histories of thousands
> of people with known levels of childhood radiation exposure.
>
> For countless boomers who strolled around in the 1950s and '60s
> wearing "I Gave My Tooth to Science" pins, the news of the tooth
> discovery has revived old questions. As they heard about the find,
> many of them began contacting Mangano. "So far, 2,150 people have
> called, and they're all willing to fill out health questionnaires,"
> said Mangano. RPHP's task is to match teeth with owners, analyze
> radiation levels and health histories, and begin to assess what impact
> the Cold War fallout had on public health.
>
> "It's not an idle look into the past," said Mangano. "It's about the
> present and the future." And the reason why should pique the interest
> of every parent, because many of the teeth from today's children show
> strontium-90 levels as high as those found in St. Louis children at
> the height of the atmospheric bomb tests.
>
> WHAT RADIATION?
>
> But where is today's radiation coming from? Not from residual bomb
> fallout, say nuclear experts: Strontium-90 from the bomb tests would
> have decayed to fairly low levels by now. According to RPHP studies
> published in peer-reviewed journals, the radioactive agent appears to
> be highest in children born near nuclear power plants.
>
> Strontium-90 enters human bodies through cow's milk, water, and fruits
> and vegetables grown in soil exposed to radioactive runoff or
> contaminated rainfall. Since it mimics the calcium fetuses and young
> children need to form teeth and bones, it easily permeates growing
> bodies. Once there, it can disturb bone marrow -- where the immune
> system forms the white cells that fight cancer, bacteria, and viruses.
> All of this, postulate researchers, puts exposed children at risk of
> leukemia, cancer, and infectious diseases.
>
> Over the past few years, Mangano and his fellow researchers have
> released their findings on some 2,000 teeth from children born near
> reactors in five states. In some regions, the researchers have shown
> that radiation levels and death rates from childhood cancers have
> grown at an almost identical pace. They have also found that when
> reactors close, area infant mortality rates improve dramatically, and
> cancer mortality rates of those over 65 improve even more
> significantly.
>
> So far, teeth from children born in Miami-Dade County and other
> southeastern Florida counties have the highest concentrations of
> strontium-90 in the United States, which might be explained by the
> fact that two nuclear reactors there emitted 10.39 trillion picocuries
> of radioactivity into the air between 1970 and 1987, an amount equal
> to about three-fourths of all the radioactivity released during the
> infamous Three Mile Island accident.
>
> In the same region, cancer rates for children under 10 rose 35.2
> percent from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, compared to a 10.8
> percent rise nationwide, according to one RPHP report. Breast cancer
> mortality rates are up 26 percent near one of the reactors and 55
> percent near the other, compared to a 1 percent increase nationwide.
>
> Childhood cancer rates jumped 75 percent in the San Louis Obispo,
> Calif., area after a reactor opened there. In Pennsylvania, the baby
> tooth researchers also tracked a rise in childhood cancers that
> corresponded with a reactor opening. "We think that when you have this
> documented increase in radiation in the body after the reactor is
> opened, followed by an increase in childhood cancer, this is strong
> evidence suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship," said Mangano.
>
> A CALL TO ACTION
>
> As startling as they are, RPHP findings haven't yet translated into
> public policy, which worries the researchers more than ever. Little
> more than a year ago, most pundits were predicting a gradual phase-out
> of nuclear power in the United States. But now the Bush Administration
> wants to license new nuclear power plants, and many of the 103 nuclear
> power plants soon up for relicensing may get a previously unexpected
> extended lease on life.
>
> According to Victor Sidel, past president of the American Public
> Health Association, "The [RPHP] studies are certainly cause for others
> to be done. If the findings are the same, then that's cause for social
> policy to be based upon them." The odds of other studies getting
> underway, though, do not appear high. The baby-tooth researchers have
> had to rely on private grants and direct-mail appeals for funding and
> volunteers to solicit teeth.
>
> Connecticut nurse Agnes Reynolds is one of those volunteers. The
> mother of a 9-year-old boy battling leukemia, Reynolds doesn't know
> what caused her son's illness. But she does want to know why childhood
> cancer rates are soaring among children living near nuclear power
> plants, as her family does.
>
> So she asks parents to snatch fallen teeth from beneath their
> children's pillows and donate them to the baby tooth project. She
> posts messages to online parenting groups, stocks flyers in waiting
> rooms, and otherwise helps to get the 3,000 new baby teeth needed for
> further study. She wants people "to pay attention" to the risks around
> them. That's a lesson she says she may have learned the hard way.
> Unless the government taboo on studying radiation-caused health risks
> is broken, say researchers, countless others will too.
>
> New Hampshire-based writer Joni Praded covers wildlife and
> environmental issues for a variety of magazines.
>
> Copyright 2002, E/The Environmental Magazine
>
>
>
>
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