Study: Cancer cases likely in those exposed to atomic test
After decades of study, the National Cancer Institute said Tuesday that some people probably got cancer from the radioactive fallout that wafted across New Mexico after the U.S. government detonated the first atomic bomb in 1945. However, the exact number is unknown.
The institute disclosed its conclusions in a series of scientific papers on radiation doses and cancer risks resulting from the Trinity Test, which marked a key point in the once-secret Manhattan Project. The Congress considers legislation that would include the downwinders in New Mexico in a federal compensation program for people exposed to radiation released during atmospheric tests or employees in the uranium industry.
“Too many of these unwilling participants in our country’s national security strategy are still struggling with illness or have lost loved ones to radiation exposure,” U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, a sponsor of the legislation, said after organizing a meeting in August with lawmakers, former miners, survivor groups from New Mexico, Idaho and Guam and others.
Downwinders have said their communities have been plagued by cancer, birth defects and stillbirths.
Tina Cordova, a co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium and a cancer survivor, has said the government did nothing at the time or in the decades after to monitor what was happening because of the fallout.
She has pointed to research published in 2019 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on data that showed a spike in infant mortality with no known cause other than it began after the Trinity Test. She said the increase followed what had been a steady decline in infant mortality in New Mexico up until August 1945.
The National Cancer Institute’s research was aimed at trying to estimate the range of possible radiation-related cancer cases in New Mexico related to the Trinity Test. The team looked at published data on fallout from the test and gathered information about the typical diet and lifestyle of people living in the area in 1945.
Small focus groups were formed and interviews were done with 11 older adults who were in the same communities where they lived during the 1940s or 1950s.
The researchers described the process for estimating radiation doses as lengthy, saying the work involved more than 120 million calculations to estimate doses to the organs or tissues at greatest risk from fallout exposure. At the top of the list is the thyroid.
They estimated that the largest doses would have occurred in Torrance and Guadalupe counties based on the fallout pattern. All of the state’s counties were included in the analysis.
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