[HN Gopher] US Army researched the health effects of radioactivi...
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US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis
1945-1970 (2011)
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-05-23 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mospace.umsystem.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (mospace.umsystem.edu)
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Server appears to be getting hugged to death. Here is the archive
| link.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.u...
| rightbyte wrote:
| When I am bitter about the state of academia I remind my self
| that research in medicine especially on mental patients used to
| be horrendous.
|
| These mocked ethics commitees are there for a good reason.
| observationist wrote:
| That doesn't mean they shouldn't be reined in or criticized
| when they take themselves too seriously or go too far.
| Bureaucracies need regular pruning or they take over.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like
| kind of an _unnecessary_ study. There have been lots of
| population exposures to radiation before then, and many more
| since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And,
| if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for
| government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation
| and translation of data, I 'm sure that there was nothing to be
| gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians.
|
| By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In
| Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-
| rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy.
| [2]
|
| 1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/
|
| 2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/
| bguebert wrote:
| It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with
| plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind
| since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out
| to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this
| kind of thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens
| zero-sharp wrote:
| There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts
| of things:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos
|
| (radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
| greenavocado wrote:
| It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium.
| https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf
| oooyay wrote:
| Radon mainly effects the lungs and requires continued exposure.
| I still personally would not expect a radon rich spring to be
| healthy, even with short term exposure. The effects of radon
| exposure over time on the lungs are well studied. Anecdotally,
| the primitive way to determine radon presence in a home without
| the use of sensors is to look at the number of scratches on a
| window. Radon causes them.
| mpreda wrote:
| What kind of window scratches? on the inside or the outside
| of the window? visible to the eye?
| Retric wrote:
| Microscopic. Picture on page 20 looks like little dots. htt
| ps://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/DHSForms/Served/le3..
| .
| oooyay wrote:
| They can be visible with enough density, but it really
| depends on the pico-Curies and the window placement
| relative to sources.
| nsguy wrote:
| Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We
| did. No Radon...
|
| AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation
| exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going
| around about how a small amount of radiation can be
| beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.
| oooyay wrote:
| I have one, and a sub slab Radon abatement system. My
| levels were pretty high for a basement and that was how I
| learned about Radon. You're 100% correct about that there
| is no safe level of Radon exposure. The international
| community decided on "safe levels" because the cost of
| abatement is far and away from what many countries can
| afford, but I think they're moving to the "no safe levels"
| definition this year.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Good news: you might not need to add a radon tank to the hot
| tub you already own. The control group for [2] was people who
| did not do any hot spring bathing at all during an average
| week, so their methodology does not explore the significance of
| the radon itself.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| The interesting thing is that they didn't find a higher
| incidence of lung, esophageal, and other soft-tissue cancers
| in elderly folks who bath in radon springs more than once a
| week.
|
| The blood pressure reduction probably has more to do with
| heat exposure than with radon itself. Seems to me that
| regular exposure to a normal sauna or hot spring would
| probably elicit similar results.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| It was a straw poll. A sampling bias is that none of the
| people who had died of cancer responded.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| People don't die of cancer instantly -- in many cases,
| it's pretty indolent, and "alive with cancer"/"in
| remission" are fairly common statuses. This would surely
| be picked up in the respondent data.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| If I were dying of cancer, odds are good that I would
| have ended up in the control group for not being
| especially proactive about visiting the hot springs. The
| authors of [2] explain this limitation themselves:
|
| "Some study limitations should be considered. ...
| healthier people may have been more likely to bathe in
| the radon hot springs."
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I am reminded of this somewhat unrelated but interesting bit of
| history involving glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. I got
| radium and radon crossed in my brain before looking up this
| article, but figured it's interesting enough to share anyway:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
| drewcoo wrote:
| Sure, but this is the US and they hadn't tried it on a
| contained black population yet . . .
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the
| fact that the government tends to experiment on these
| populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing
| you can do about it.
|
| About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the
| US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat
| like dirt.
|
| Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| "Through this case study, the author explores how a large number
| of participants inside an organization will willingly participate
| in organizational acts that are harmful to others, and how large
| numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of
| organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or
| harmful activity by an organization."
|
| Truly unsettling. Everyday Americans secretly exploited by their
| own government. If this were punishment for a crime, it would be
| unconstitutional due to being cruel, inhumane, and without due
| process. But it wasn't punishment for anything, the government
| just attacked them.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| From the timeline on page 253:
|
| 1944 - Army Medical Corps authorize Rochester to study polonium
| exposure on humans (Moss, et al, 196)
|
| April 10, 1945 - The first human plutonium injection occurs in
| Oak Ridge; three others were "approved" for Chicago,
| Berkeley/San Francisco, and Los Alamos by Dr. Friedell at Oak
| Ridge (under Langham"s instruction), Hamilton, and Warren.
| (Moss, et al, 195)
|
| April 26, 1945 - Second human plutonium injection takes place
| in a 68-year old man at Billings Hospital in Chicago (Moss, et
| al, 197).
|
| May 14, 1945 - Third person injected with plutonium at the
| University of California Hospital in San Francisco (Moss, et
| al, 197).
|
| October 1945-July 1946 - Eleven patients were injected with
| plutonium at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY; this
| included seven men and four women ranging in age from 18 years
| through 68 years old. The 18-year old died approximately 1.5
| years later (Moss, et al, 205).
| tomwheeler wrote:
| St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It
| remains a problem to this day.
|
| Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just
| a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the
| Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an
| underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a
| creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases
| associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers
| claim it's no big deal.
| tylerflick wrote:
| All of this is still probably less toxic than the water in the
| Lake of the Ozarks (partially kidding).
| wumeow wrote:
| TLDR: they wanted to study how aerosols disperse in cities and
| they underestimated or ignored the risks of the tracer they used.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The aerosols being dispersed were biological and chemical
| weapons. If the responsible government officials underestimated
| the risks, it was because they had no evidence that it would be
| harmless to spray their experimental biological and chemical
| weapons on schoolchildren.
|
| Page 30:
|
| "Army officials lied to city leaders and residents, saying the
| tests were intended to see if smoke screens could protect the
| city from Russian bomber attacks. But recently released Army
| reports admit that was a "cover story" for... secret biological
| and chemical warfare tests (Sawyer, 1994)."
| wumeow wrote:
| No, the aerosol was zinc cadmium sulfide. It wasn't testing
| _of_ biological and chemical weapons, it was testing of a
| simulant to model how those weapons would disperse through a
| city.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The official story was that the aerosols were "biological
| simulants." If the official story could have gotten away
| with zinc cadmium sulfide, it would have.
|
| Page 69:
|
| "The St. Louis study may have involved far more than
| biological "simulants", per the official military talking
| point. There is indication of a secret study conducted in
| tandem to the "official" military-sponsored St. Louis
| aerosol study. The second study, which for some reason
| warrants even more secrecy than its parallel study, appears
| to have been connected to a new type of deadly nuclear
| weapon, one of many being developed by the coalition, to be
| tested on unsuspecting residents of St. Louis"
| aaomidi wrote:
| "Why don't people trust the government with vaccines???"
|
| Meanwhile. The government.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
| kube-system wrote:
| -- Sent via DARPA Internet Protocol
|
| The US government does so many damn things that it can be used
| as an example of just about anything.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Unless, I'm mistaken, this was at Pruitt-Igoe, the first US
| housing project, torn down in the 70s. The testing was long
| thought to be some kind of "conspiracy theory," which is a
| wonderful way to dismiss any claims of official abuse.
|
| The first link DDG gave me:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-s...
| suby wrote:
| > A government study found that in a worst-case scenario,
| "repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney
| and bone toxicity and lung cancer." Yet the Army contends there
| is no evidence anyone in St. Louis was harmed.
|
| > A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement to the AP that
| health assessments performed by the Army "concluded that exposure
| would not pose a health risk," and follow-up independent studies
| also found no cause for alarm.
|
| This whole thing is outrageous.
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(page generated 2024-05-23 23:00 UTC)