Vancouver was a known hot spot and NO ONE is checking the health impacts.
by Frank Rotering
A recent US study has acknowledged for the first time that fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and early 1960s exposed the entire US population to radiation. Although levels were low, they were higher than previously suspected, and heavily concentrated in a number of "hot spots," including California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
While the study stopped at the Canada-US border, the radiation did not. British Columbia is in fact a known hot spot for radiation exposure. In 1994 three researchers from Health Canada issued a study which clearly illustrated BC's vulnerable position. They showed that most of the radioactive fallout during this period was deposited between 40 and 60 degrees north latitude. Vancouver, at 49 degrees north latitude, was right in the middle of the hot zone.
To see why BC was hit so hard after the nuclear tests, take a globe or world map and put your finger on the province. Now trace a line due west, across the Pacific Ocean. Where it first hits land, your finger will be at the Kamchatka Peninsula in the former Soviet Union, the Siberian outpost where many of the Soviet tests took place during the Cold War.
The fallout from these tests was picked up by the prevailing westerly winds and headed straight for BC. On arriving here a week or so later, the radioactive dust was stopped by our mountains and deposited with our frequent rains. To a lesser degree, the same happened with US tests in the South Pacific and with Chinese tests at Lop Nur in China's interior.
Once on the ground, the radioactive particles insinuated themselves into the food chain and drinking water. Cows grazed where the rain fell, contaminating their milk. Crops were coated and absorbed the fallout. The radioactive food and water were then ingested, mothers and children being most at risk.
"Baby boomers" were born in the two decades following World War II, when the atmospheric testing took place. This makes the boomers unique in a fundamental way. They are the only generation in history to have absorbed significant amounts of radiation while in their mothers' wombs. During infancy, no other generation has so extensively breathed radioactive air, played in radioactive rain, or consumed radioactive milk. As a result the boomers, especially those who grew up in BC, are unwitting participants in an unprecedented experiment in radiation exposure.
Red Fallout
On September 20, 1961 the Vancouver Sun ran a huge headline on its front page: "Red Fallout Soars To Record In Canada." Then, in smaller type: "No Hazard – at Moment."
These few words speak volumes about the early 1960s. A Cold War raged between the United States and the Soviet Union – the "Reds." As part of their escalating war preparations, the two sides repeatedly exploded nuclear bombs within their territories. Between 1945 and 1963, the two countries conducted hundreds of above-ground nuclear tests, each pumping massive amounts of radioactive dust into the atmosphere.
Scientists were ignorant then, as they are today, about what levels of radiation are safe. Despite this ignorance, government officials and university professors reassured people that the radiation posed no danger to health. More seriously, mothers were encouraged to continue feeding milk to their children.
As the tests continued, suspicions grew that fallout increased birth defects and the incidence of leukemia. Public outrage swelled, especially in the US. Huge protests were held in Washington DC, pressing for an end to American testing in the Nevada desert. In October 1958, Californians panicked when the Los Angeles health department reported that radiation there was 20% above safe levels.
American chemist Linus Pauling, a two-time Nobel prize winner, estimated in 1958 that tests conducted until then would cause one million people to die from leukemia. This number, he said, would rise to five million if the tests continued. When a sharp rise in radioactivity was detected in children's teeth and bones, Pauling and 2,000 other scientists petitioned the US government to stop the testing. President Eisenhower rejected this initiative, prompting Pauling to take his campaign to the international stage. He gathered 9,000 signatures from scientists in 44 countries, then presented the petition to the United Nations.
This worked. In August 1963, the US, Soviet Union, and the UK signed a treaty that banned above-ground nuclear tests. France and China were not at the table and continued atmospheric testing until China exploded its last bomb in 1986.
During their reign of terror, the tests produced two sharp peaks in global radiation levels: one in 1957-58 and the other in 1961-64. The first peak resulted from the initial phase of heavy testing by the US and the Soviet Union. Radiation then plunged as the two superpowers voluntarily suspended their tests. In 1961, during the Berlin Crisis, the Soviet Union unilaterally ended the moratorium and resumed its detonations. The US quickly followed suit, driving global radiation to new highs. After the 1963 treaty was signed, environmental radiation declined rapidly and never again approached these nightmare levels.
Hot Rain Falls on Vancouver
While fallout descended on the province, BC residents were bombarded with conflicting advice from the experts. Dr. Gordon Shrum, head of UBC's Physics department, admitted in 1956 that fallout could scatter around the globe, and that prolonged testing could harm human health. However, as a vigorous proponent of nuclear technologies, he repeatedly insisted that current levels of fallout were much too low to impair human health. Shrum rejected claims that thousands would die from fallout as "mainly propaganda."
When "hot rain" fell on Vancouver in 1958, causing radiation to increase to 150-to-175 times normal levels, Shrum said there was "no need to worry." But a physicist in Shrum's own department, Dr. G.M. Griffiths, was deeply concerned about the radiation levels in BC due to the heavy rains here. Siding with Griffiths was Dr. James Foulkes, head of UBC's pharmacology department. Foulkes rejected claims by some scientists that in small doses, radiation does no harm to humans.
In 1959, BC mothers were confidently advised by Dr. Harold Copp, of UBC's Physiology department, that they should continue to use milk. Copp said he would personally keep buying milk because the level of radioactivity it contained was "far, far below the danger level."
Two government figures also offered assurances about the safety of radiation levels. Waldo Monteith, Health Minister in the Diefenbaker government, said categorically that, "… current supplies of fluid milk are safe for public consumption." Peter Bird, head of Canada's radiological protection agency, stated with similar conviction that radiation never reached dangerous levels in Canada.
Health Indicators
The health of BC residents is among the best in the world, and it improves year by year. BC's health statistics over the past century show rates of death and disease going rapidly down, while life expectancy moves steadily up.
Infant deaths in the first year of life — the infant mortality rate — is now less than four per 1,000 live births in BC. It was 60 per 1,000 live births in 1920. Even more dramatic is the reduction in maternal mortality rates. In the 1920s, about six mothers died during childbirth for every 1,000 live births. Today the number is virtually zero. Life expectancy for babies born in BC today is almost 80 years, an increase of 16 years since 1920. Clearly, these figures and many others are cause for rejoicing.
But during this period of rapid improvement there is a puzzling exception. From about 1960 to 1980 several health indicators in BC, particularly those relating to infant mortality, improved at a slower pace than before or after.
One example is the rate of infant mortality due to congenital anomalies [See chart on page 19]. Congenital anomalies are physical or mental defects, present at birth, that arise from abnormal development of the fetus. This rate declined by an average of 4% per year before 1961, then fluctuated around the same level until 1980. After 1980 the historical decline resumed.
A similar pattern holds for stillbirths, which refers to fetuses that have reached 20 weeks of gestation and weigh at least 500 grams, but are born lifeless. The rate of stillbirths in BC declined rapidly until 1962, then failed to improve until 1973, when it resumed its downward trend.
These examples might be dismissed as statistical aberrations in a small population, but the pattern in BC was repeated elsewhere. In the US the impact on infant mortality occurred earlier and struck with greater force.
A 1968 study of US infant mortality rates cited a sharp decrease from 1900 to 1950, but noted a levelling off after 1950. The report concluded that "a fundamental change had occurred." In 1984 an international symposium on infant mortality found a marked slow down in infant mortality improvements between 1950 and 1970 in Sweden, West Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
Evidently, something happened across much of the northern hemisphere, starting around 1950 and petering out in the 1970s, which adversely affected public health. Officially, no one knows what it is. The most prominent hypothesis links the slow down in public health improvements to the radiation from the atmospheric bomb tests.
The scientists associated with this controversial idea include Ernest Sternglass, Arthur Tamplin, Karl Morgan, Thomas Mancuso, Carl Johnson, John Gofman, and Jay Gould (not to be confused with biologist Stephen Jay Gould). Sternglass, a Professor of Radiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, sounded the alert in his 1972 book, Secret Fallout. He described his discovery of relative health degradation wherever fallout landed or nuclear power plants vented radioactive gases.
Sternglass recounts the experience of Professor Herbert Clark and his radiochemistry class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York in April 1953. The students' Geiger counter readings were extremely high — up to 1,000 times the normal level. Two factors were found to be responsible: a 43-kiloton atomic bomb test in Nevada two days earlier, and heavy rainfall in New York the night before.
In 1968 Sternglass wrote a paper on the New York incident for Science magazine. This paper was rejected by the editors, prompting Sternglass to delve into New York's public health statistics to address their objections. He was looking for leukemia data in the three counties around Rensselaer, but also recorded infant mortality data for the area. To his surprise, these statistics showed that the historical improvement in infant mortality came to a virtual halt in the 1950s, when the Nevada tests began.
Low Level Radiation
In 1991 Jay Gould and Benjamin Goldman published Deadly Deceit: Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Cover-Up, which summarized the findings of this dissident group of scientists. The book also discussed the global health effects of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.
The key idea in Deadly Deceit concerns the relationship between dose (radiation received) and response (health damage). The authors' hypothesis is that extremely low levels of radiation can cause significant health damage if this radiation is applied to sensitive internal organs over a long period of time. Higher levels of radiation applied in the same manner will increase the damage, but at a progressively slower rate.
Radioactive isotopes from fallout or nuclear power plants impact the human body in precisely this fashion. These substances enter our bodies through the food chain, settle in our bones, and irradiate our internal organs at low levels and over long periods.
Conventional nuclear thinking is based largely on the brief, intense, external radiation that results from direct exposure to a nuclear blast. Much of the data for this model comes from studying the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts in 1945. Generally, a linear dose-response relationship is assumed, with no threshold for health damage. This implies that at low levels of radiation, health damage is negligible.
Gould and Goldman Summarize the Different Views This Way:
"Despite the warnings of Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling, and Andrei Sakharov, there is nothing in the century-long experience with brief exposures to high intensity X-rays and radiation to prepare physicians to understand the distinctly different biochemical mechanisms involved in internal low-level radiation. Once radioactive fission products come down in the rain and enter the food chain, immune systems become vulnerable to free radicals by means quite different from the destruction of DNA by high-level radiation. This was not known by many of the nuclear scientists who developed the atomic bomb, and by biologists concerned with genetic damage."
The "free radicals" mentioned by Gould and Goldman are modified oxygen molecules. Such molecules have gained an electron from their collisions with radioactive particles in the body. With an extra electron, normal oxygen becomes negatively charged and highly dangerous to human cells. These radicals are attracted to the cell membrane and dissolve their major constituent, lipid molecules. If the cell is unable to repair the damage, it will die or survive in mutated form. Free radicals are particularly dangerous when they attack the blood cells of the immune system or the cells of the hormone system.
For the most sensitive members of a population — the very young and very old, and those suffering from immune-related diseases — the Gould-Goldman hypothesis suggests a damage response approximately 1,000 times greater than the conventional assumption. Such a difference, if it proved accurate, would make a mockery of current radiation standards and practices.
Gould and Goldman fear that the boomers, especially those in rainy, exposed areas like BC, have been most severely affected by radiation from the bomb tests:
"Further research is urgently needed to evaluate the hypothesis that low-level radiation from fallout is a significant factor in the baby-boom generation's immune-system damage. . . . If the hypothesis is correct, postwar immune-system damage would be greater in areas that were hit most heavily by fallout in the rain from the atmospheric bomb tests."
The boomers are part of a health-conscious generation. Most have quit smoking, powerfully driving down the incidence of lung cancer, at least among males. Exercise has become more common, as has a healthy diet. These factors will allow many boomers to experience a long life and a vigorous old age.
For an unknown number, however, the damage to their immune systems from early exposure to radiation could come back to haunt them. Strontium-90, lodged deep in their bones, has been irradiating sensitive organs for up to five decades. This insidious assault may now start taking its toll. Despite advances in medicine and more enlightened lifestyles, cancers and infectious diseases could increasingly claim its boomer victims as weakened immune systems capitulate.
In a belated effort to answer its critics, the US government has concluded the first phase of what may become an extensive study of Cold War fallout exposures and their health effects. When asked about Health Canada's plans, a Ministry spokesperson said that, "We are still actively studying this issue, and we have not ruled out a complete re-assessment of fallout levels nor a comprehensive assessment of the health effects on Canadians."
Boomers and others concerned about the health effects of radiation should pressure the federal government to move forward aggressively with these assessments, for at least three good reasons.
First, boomers could add years to their lives if they recognize the danger and are tested regularly for cancers and immunity-related diseases.
Second, the effects of low-level radiation are intensely disputed. If more data is collected, perhaps a scientific determination can replace the almost ideological schism that currently exists.
Third, Canada could use the data to reconsider its standards and policies regarding radioactivity in foods, especially milk.
Climate and geography once conspired against BC, exposing the province to perhaps the highest fallout levels in the world. This misfortune now gives us an opportunity to improve our public policies and to help resolve some important mysteries about low-level radiation exposure.
* Frank Rotering, 53, is a computer instructor and writer, with a particular interest in public health issues. His father died from leukemia in 1978 at age 56.
* References
Archives of Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, Victoria Colonist
Chart #2: BC Vital Statistics Agency, Statistics Canada
Deadly Deceit: Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up, Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1991
A Retrospective of Fallout Monitoring in Canada, E.G. Letourneau, D.P. Meyerhof, and B. Ahier, Health Canada, 1994
Infant, Perinatal, Maternal, and Childhood Mortality in the United States, Sam Shapiro et al., Harvard University Press, 1968
Proceedings of the International Collaborative Effort on Perinatal and Infant Mortality, Volume 1, National Center for Health Statistics, 1984
The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age: The Hidden History, The Human Cost, John May, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989
Secret Fallout: Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three-mile Island, Ernest J. Sternglass, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972, 1981
* Web Sites
Conventional views:
www.unscear.org: United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation
www.cnts.wpi.edu/rsh: Radiation, Health, and Science
www.healthservices.gov.bc.ca/rpteb: BC Radiation Protection Branch
Critical views:
www.ccnr.org: Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
www.radiation.org: Radiation and Public Health Project
www.llrc.org: Low-level Radiation Campaign