Nuke test return will poison earth

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Tuesday, June 8: I am at my computer moving words around a screen, but not seeing them. My mind is fixed on three people I know, at three different hospitals, all seeing doctors, all undergoing tests and procedures, all doing battle with cancer.

Caryn is having a check-up. She's examined every six months now. Three and a half years ago she found a lump, was diagnosed, had surgery and months of radiation and chemotherapy.

Now she is well. But we hold our breath every time she has a pain that lasts more than a few days, every time she has to return to Southwood for tests.

Her sister, Susan, younger by a few years, the mother of four, her youngest just age 5, was diagnosed with cancer in March. She's being operated on today.

J. has prostate cancer. Doctor A. has recommended surgery. J. is meeting with Dr. B today.

They're all quite common, all these cancers. That's what you hear all the time. That's what you learn when you look around. If you asked Americans to stand up if they had cancer or a relative or friend with cancer, no one would be left sitting. That's how prevalent cancer is.

But why is the unanswered question. Why are so many people so ill? What causes healthy cells to mutate and grow? Why are children born with cancer? Why do they get leukemia? What is it in our world that is poisoning us?

Hundreds of things cause cancer is what we're encouraged to believe. Because if it's hundreds of things - too much meat in the diet, too many dairy products, too much sun, not enough ozone or exercise or vitamins or good karma - then blame can't be affixed to any one thing.

Add to this, the oft repeated excuse that because we're living longer, it only seems as if there's more cancer, and cancer becomes almost routine, a seemingly inevitable by-product of a long life.

But young people are dying of cancer too. And among young people, cancer is an epidemic.

Before the Atomic Age began in Los Alamos 50 years ago, there wasn't all this melanoma and leukemia. Every month didn't bring with it another story of a neighbor, a friend, a relative, just diagnosed.

We know that some cancer is the result of exploding radioactive bombs in the air or in the ground; of fueling reactors with materials so toxic they have to be stored in lead and monitored for thousands of years.

We have ample evidence of all that.

In 1978, the Rocky Mountain News conducted a door-to-door survey in Broomfield, Colo., in a neighborhood that got its water from a creek that meandered beside the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. The water in the creek had high levels of radium, tritium and plutonium. The people in the neighborhood had high levels of cancer: Among 47 residences, cancer had struck 13 people.

In 1979, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that children who grew up in Southern Utah in the 1950s, when the area was dusted repeatedly with radioactive fallout from atomic bombs, died from leukemia at more than twice the normal rate.

This report led to a landmark civil suit brought against the U.S. government by nearly 2,000 people, who claimed that federal authorities had negligently exposed them to radioactive fallout, which caused cancer. These victims won their suit.

The correlation between radiation and cancer has been documented again and again. But the government disputes it; power companies dispute it; big businesses that make money from radioactive products dispute it.

But the proof is in the high incidences of cancers among young, healthy people who don't smoke, who don't have a family history of cancer, who aren't predisposed to the disease, who aren't supposed to be at risk at all.

In the 1950s, radioactive fallout from U.S. and Soviet testing fell over New England, carried by rain. The rain fed the grass and the grass fed the cows and millions of children drank milk from those cows.

That milk, consumed so very long ago, could well be killing people today.

It would be nice to think that the government had learned a lesson from the past.

But it hasn't.

The Clinton administration is about to break a nuclear moratorium - there hasn't been a nuclear test anywhere in the world since last summer. But there will be after July 1.

The U.S. and Britain have plans to conduct nine underground explosions in the Nevada desert before 1996. No doubt, in light of this action, Russia, France and China will resume testing, too.

And on it will go. More radiation in the earth, in lakes and streams, in the food cycle, and in ourselves. You reap what you sow, the saying goes. A poisoned earth will give back poisoned lives.