by Moushumi Basu, Special to CorpWatch
October 7th, 2009
Creative Commons Licensed: Adapted by Ionia Kershaw for Truthout.org (via Flickr)
“I have had three miscarriages and lost five children within a week of their births,” says Hira Hansda, a miner’s wife. “Even after 20 years of marriage we have no children today.” Now in her late forties, she sits outside her mud hut in Jadugoda Township, site of one of the oldest uranium mines in India.
The Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) operates that mine, part of a cluster of four underground and one open cast mines and two processing plants, in East Singbhum district in the Eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. The deepest plunges almost one kilometer into the earth.
Incorporated as a public sector enterprise under the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) in 1967, UCIL has sole responsibility for mining and processing all of India's uranium. And since the strength of the Jadugoda region's uraninite ore is extremely low, it takes many tons of earth as well as complex metallurgical processes to yield even a small amount of useable uranium ore—along with tons of radioactive waste, disposed of in unlined tailing dams.
UCIL processes the ore into yellowcake and sends it to the Nuclear Fuel Complex in Hyderabad, where it is officially designated for use in nuclear reactors. But it is an open secret that some of the nuclear material becomes the key ingredient in India's nuclear arsenal. (India is one of only three states—along with Israel and Pakistan—that are not signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. North Korea withdrew from the Treaty in 2003.)
Unhealthy Villages
Radiation and health experts across the world charge that toxic materials and radioactivity released by the mining and processing operations are causing widespread infertility, birth defects and cancers. A 2008 health survey by the Indian chapter of International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), found that “primary sterility was found to be more common in the people residing near uranium mining operations area.”
Jadugoda residents Kaderam Tudu and his wife, Munia, considered themselves fortunate when their infant was born alive, until, “I found that my baby son did not have his right ear and instead in its place was a blob of flesh,” says Tudu, a day worker in his late thirties. Their son, Shyam Tudu, now eight, has a severe hearing impairment.
Even children who appear healthy are impacted. "The youths from our villages have become victims of social ostracism," says Parvati Manjhi, and cannot find spouses. "And a number of our girls have been abandoned by their husbands, when they failed to give birth,” Now middle-aged, Parvati and her husband, Dhuwa Manjhi, who used to work for UCIL, are childless.
Harrowing tales fill the region around the mines, and add irony to the area's name, Jharkhand, which in the local tribal language means “forest endowed with nature’s bounties.” If the lush land was the indigenous population's boon for centuries, its rich mineral reserves have become their bane. Six decades of industrialization has depleted the forest cover, degraded the environment, displaced tribal peoples—who along with Dalit ("untouchables") form an oppressed underclass—and devastated a way of life deeply interwoven with nature.
Despite India's economic boom and proximity to one of the country's richest mineral reserves, the villages in Jharkhand are now among the poorest in the country, according to the Center For Science & Environment’s (New Delhi) 2008 report “Rich Lands Poor People.”
Uranium Corporation of India Limited in Jharkhand
UCIL’s underground mines in Jadugoda, Bhatin, Turamdhih, Narwapahar, and its open cast mine at Banduhurang extract 1,000 tons per day (TPD) of uranium ore. Two underground mines in the pipeline at Baghjata and Mahuldih will boost that amount. The ore is processed at the Jadugoda and Turamdih mills with a combined capacity of 5,000 TDP. The company earned $64 million in 2007-08, and made a $3 million profit.
The 20-year lease for UCIL's mines was up in 2007, and a new application is being processed. Under it, the company wants to add 6.37 hectares to tailing dam capacity and expand production, according to UCIL Chairman and Managing Director Ramendra Gupta. This move requires an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Environmental Management Plan (EMP) drawn up by the Central Institute of Mining & Fuel Research (CIMFR), along with a public hearing.
Addressing the affected community at the May public hearing in Jadugoda, the company represented the local plans as “a marginal expansion.” But the UCIL website promises “a quantum leap in UCIL’s activities” that includes plans to "deepen the existing mines, expand its processing facilities,” and “not only opening new mines, but also the development of the community around its operations.”
While the company has created local schools and provides jobs and social services, villagers who attended the hearing argued that these provisions do not compensate for the health effects and destruction of their way of life.
“Why are we being made to pay such a heavy price, for so many decades”? Asks Hira Hansda, speaking of her three miscarriages and birth to five infants that quickly died. Her husband Sonaram worked at the tailing dam as a casual employee between 1984-87, and like many villagers, he links the deterioration in local health conditions to the arrival of the uranium mines. The last three surveys conducted in the area found increased radiation levels.
Heavy Security at UCIL’s Public Hearing Keeps Villagers Out
The public hearing on UCIL's new application took place at the heavily fortified camp of the Central India Security Force (CISF) within the UCIL colony at Jadugoda. Conducted by the Jharkhand State Pollution Control Board, the proceedings were marked by restrictions on personal liberties under sections of a law applying to situations with the potential to cause civil unrest.
Leaving little room for the public or protesters, the hall was packed with hundreds of UCIL workers and other company beneficiaries who held placards reading: “When compared to hunger, pollution is a small issue," and "Save UCIL.”
Those who had lost their lands and health to the mines were physically barred from the tent. Outside the proceedings, protesters shouted: “Do not destroy our land," “No uranium, no uranium waste, no weapons, care for the future." Many indigenous villagers waved the banner of the Jharkhandi Organization Against Radiation (JOAR), winner of the Germany-based Nuclear Free Future Award for its long crusade against the hazards of uranium mining in Jadugoda. The protesters denounced the hearing as "a farce" and demanded that it be immediately stopped.
Villager and JOAR president, Ghanashyam Biruli, issued the demands: no new uranium mines, bring the existing mine under international safety guidelines, return unused tribal land, provide livelihood and rehabilitation to displaced people, clean up the contamination, commission an independent study of environmental contamination and health effects, and monitor water bodies to ensure that the radionuclides do not seep into the aquifer that is the lifeline of more than 100,000 people. The activists also argued that since the country can buy uranium on the international market, there is no compelling need to expand UCIL's capacity.
The real compelling need, they asserted, was protecting health and the environment. The 2008 health survey by the Indian chapter of International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) provided clear evidence, finding that:
* Couples living near the mines were "1.58 times more vulnerable to primary sterility" with 9.6 percent of couples in study villages unable to conceive after three years of marriage, compared with 6.27 percent in a reference (control) group.
* Birth defects followed a similar pattern with 1.84 times higher incidence: “[B]abies from mothers, who lived near uranium mining operation area, suffered a significant increase in congenital deformities,” according to the report. While 4.49 percent of mothers living in the study villages reported bearing children with congenital deformities, only 2.49 percent of mothers in reference villages fell under this category." The national rate for people with disabilities (including congenital deformities) is 3 percent, according to official government statistics.
* Deformed babies near the mining operations are almost 6 times more likely to die, with 9.25 percent mothers in the study villages reporting congenital deformities as the cause of death of their children. In the reference village, mothers reported 1.70 percent of babies died of deformities.
* Cancer deaths were also higher: 2.87 percent of households in study villages attributed the cause of death to be cancer, compared to 1.89 percent in the reference village.
These factors contributed to a lowered life expectancy. In the study villages 68.33 percent of the population died before reaching the state's average life expectancy: 62 years old.
UCIL Denies Contamination
Despite such alarming reports, radiation data are not made public because they fall under the purview of the Atomic Energy Act of 1962. UCIL / DAE (Department of Atomic Energy) also cites security concerns for refusing to release data on health of the workers. But Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda, a 1999 award-winning film by Shri Prakash documented that, despite a law mandating regular monitoring, in the last five- to ten-year period few workers underwent blood and urine tests to assess the impact of radiation.
Independent scientists have confirmed the danger. Professor Hiroaki Koide, from the Research Reactor Institute, Kyoto University, Japan, sampled soil and air in the surrounding villages and documented that “The circumference of tailing ponds is impacted with uranium radiation. The strength of the radiation is of 10 to 100 times high in comparison to places without contamination. ...There are places where uranium concentration is high in the road or the riverside, and it is thought that tailings are used for construction material,” including on villagers' houses." Tailings are production waste material that, according to critics are unsafely stored, dumped, and used for landfills, roads and construction.
UCIL Technical Director D Acharya denied that the company was responsible for radiological contamination. “UCIL’s safety and pollution control measures are at par with the international standards, comparable at any point of time,” he said. The company is dealing with naturally occurring materials, he noted, the very low grade ore extracted is a minimal environmental hazard, and the company is not enriching the ore in Jadugoda.
But tacitly acknowledging the risks, UCIL head, Gupta, noted in the 2008 Annual Report that "External gamma radiation, Radon concentration, suspended particulate matters, airborne long lived Alpha activity and concentration of radio nuclides- uranium and Radium in surface and ground water, in soil and food items etc are monitored regularly."
Although he presented no evidence, UCIL Technical Director Acharya said that allegations of health problems are canards spread by anti-uranium lobbies, and that the physical fitness of the employees can be gauged the UCIL football team's success in winning the DAE tournaments for the past five years.
“From time to time we have also conducted structured health surveys and examinations, by independent sources," said Acharya. "One was done by the erstwhile Bihar Assembly, about ten years ago, but the findings are absolutely normal.” (The area was part of Bihar at the time.) "The effects of radiation are being constantly monitored by independent watchdogs, and there are health physics experts who are always with us, for round-the clock-vigil of the situation. Hence, there is really no cause of concern,” he added.
That is not the experience of many villagers, who link serious health problems to the mines. Like many of the women in the surrounding areas, Hansda's pregnancies were a time of terror. “It fills within us fear and apprehensions of the possible ordeal that may be in store. Who knows what would be the fate of the baby,” she said.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15450
Showing posts with label Birth Defects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Birth Defects. Show all posts
Friday, October 9, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
India's Generation of Children Crippled by Uranium Waste
Published on Sunday, August 30, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
India's Generation of Children Crippled by Uranium Waste
Observer investigation uncovers link between dramatic rise in birth defects in Punjab and pollution from coal-fired power stations
by Gethin Chamberlain
Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country's borders.
Gurpreet Sigh, 7, who has cerebral palsy and microcephaly, and is from Sirsar, 50km from the Punjabi town of Bathinda. He is being treated at the Baba Farid centre for Special Children in Bathinda Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain.
Some sit mutely, staring into space, lost in a world of their own; others cry out, rocking backwards and forwards. Few have any real control over their own bodies. Their anxious parents fret over them, murmuring soft words of encouragement, hoping for some sort of miracle that will free them from a nightmare.
Health workers in the Punjabi cities of Bathinda and Faridkot knew something was terribly wrong when they saw a sharp increase in the number of birth defects, physical and mental abnormalities, and cancers. They suspected that children were being slowly poisoned.
But it was only when a visiting scientist arranged for tests to be carried out at a German laboratory that the true nature of their plight became clear. The results were unequivocal. The children had massive levels of uranium in their bodies, in one case more than 60 times the maximum safe limit.
The results were both momentous and mysterious. Uranium occurs naturally throughout the world, but is normally only present in low background levels which pose no threat to human health. There was no obvious source in the Punjab that could account for such high levels of contamination.
And if a few hundred children - spread over a large area - were contaminated, how many thousands more might also be affected? Those are questions the Indian authorities appear determined not to answer. Staff at the clinics say they were visited and threatened with closure if they spoke out. The South African scientist whose curiosity exposed the scandal says she has been warned by the authorities that she may not be allowed back into the country.
But an Observer investigation has now uncovered disturbing evidence to suggest a link between the contamination and the region's coal-fired power stations. It is already known that the fine fly ash produced when coal is burned contains concentrated levels of uranium and a new report published by Russia's leading nuclear research institution warns of an increased radiation hazard to people living near coal-fired thermal power stations.
The test results for children born and living in areas around the state's power stations show high levels of uranium in their bodies. Tests on ground water show that levels of uranium around the plants are up to 15 times the World Health Organisation's maximum safe limits. Tests also show that it extends across large parts of the state, which is home to 24 million people.
The findings have implications not only for the rest of India - Punjab produces two-thirds of the wheat in the country's central reserves and 40% of its rice - but for many other countries planning to build new power plants, including China, Russia, India, Germany and the US. In Britain, there are plans for a coal-fired station at the Kingsnorth facility in Kent.
The victims are being treated at the Baba Farid centres for special children in Bathinda - where there are two coal-fired thermal plants - and in nearby Faridkot. It was staff at those clinics who first voiced concerns about the increasing numbers of admissions involving severely handicapped children. They were being born with hydrocephaly, microcephaly, cerebral palsy, Down's syndrome and other complications. Several have already died.
Dr Pritpal Singh, who runs the Faridkot clinic, said the numbers of children affected by the pollution had risen dramatically in the past six or seven years. But he added that the Indian authorities appeared determined to bury the scandal. "They can't just detoxify these kids, they have to detoxify the whole Punjab. That is the reason for their reluctance," he said. "They threatened us and said if we didn't stop commenting on what's happening, they would close our clinic.
"But I decided that if I kept silent it would go on for years and no one would do anything about it. If I keep silent then the next day it will be my child. The children are dying in front of me."
Dr Carin Smit, the South African clinical metal toxicologist who arranged for the tests to be carried out in Germany, said that the situation could no longer be ignored. "There is evidence of harm for these children in my care and... it is an imperative that their bodies be cleaned up and their metabolisms be supported to deal with such a devastating presence of radioactive material," she said.
"If the contamination is as widespread as it would appear to be - as far west as Muktsar on the Pakistani border, and as far east as the foothills of Himachal Pradesh - then millions are at high risk and every new baby born to a contaminated mother is at risk."
In the Faridkot centre last week, Harmanbir Kaur, 15, was rocking gently backwards and forwards. When her test results came back, they showed she had 10 times the safe limit of uranium in her body. Her brother, Naunihal Singh, six, has double the safe level.
Harmanbir was born in Muktsar, 25 miles from Faridkot. Her mother, Kulbir Kaur, 37, watched her slowly degenerate from a healthy baby into the girl she is today, dribbling constantly, unable to feed herself, lost in a world of her own. "God knows what sin I have committed. When we go to our village people say there is a curse of God on you, but I don't believe so," she said. "Every part of this area is affected. We never imagined that there would be uranium in our kids."
A few miles down the road in Bathinda, Sukhminder Singh, 48, a farmer, watched his son Kulwinder, 13, staring into space while curling his hands up under his chin. Tests showed Kulwinder has 19 times the maximum safe level of uranium in his body. He has cerebral palsy and has already had seven operations to unbend his arms and legs.
"The government should investigate it because if our child is affected it will also affect future generations," he said. "What are they waiting for? How many children do they want to be affected? Another generation? I can leave the house for work, but my wife is always with him. Sometimes she cries and asks why God is playing with our luck. Every morning he sends a new trouble."
Doni Choudhary, aged 15 months, is waiting to be tested, though staff say he shows similar symptoms to those who have tested positive and are treating him for suspected uranium poisoning. His mother, Neelum, 22, from the state capital, Chandigarh, says he was born with hydrocephaly. His legs are useless.
"He is dependent on others. After me, who can care for him?" Neelum asks. "He tries to speak but he can't express himself and my heart cries. When will he understand that his legs don't work? What will he feel?"
India's reluctance to acknowledge the problem is hardly unexpected: the country is heavily committed to an expansion of thermal plants in Punjab and other states. Neither was it any surprise when a team of scientists from the Department of Atomic Energy visited the area and concluded that while the concentration of uranium in drinking water was "slightly high", there was "nothing to worry" about. Yet some tests recorded levels of uranium in the ground water as high as 224mcg/l (micrograms per litre) - 15 times higher than the safe level of 15mcg/l recommended by the WHO. (The US Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum safe level of 20mcg/l.)
Some scientists have proposed that the ground water may have been contaminated by contact with granite rocks that rise above the ground about 150 miles away to the south in the Tosham hills, in Haryana state. A continuation of these rocks is believed to run deep below the thick alluvial deposits that form the plains of Punjab.
Increasing demands for water, in particular to irrigate the rice crop, have led to greater dependence on tube wells. That in turn is depleting the water table in the state at an alarming rate - by at least 30cm a year, according to one study - with the result that water is being drawn from ever deeper levels. However, this theory seems to be in conflict with evidence from parents of many of the children, who say they use the mains supply, which comes from other sources.
There have also been claims that the contamination may have been exacerbated by depleted uranium carried on the wind from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a seminar in Amritsar in April, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, a former chief of the naval staff, suggested that areas within a 1,000-mile radius of Kabul - including Punjab - may be affected by depleted uranium. Although the prevailing monsoon winds blow either from the north-east or the south-west, there are times when a depression originating in the Mediterranean can result in rainfall in Punjab.
Meanwhile, smoke continues to pour from the power station chimneys and lorries shuttle backwards and forwards, taking away the fly ash to be mixed into cement at the neighbouring Ambuja factory. Inside the plant last week, there was ash everywhere, forming drifts, clinging to the skin, getting into the throat.
Ravindra Singh, the plant's security officer, said that most of the ash went to the cement works, while the rest was dumped in ash ponds. It would be more efficient to burn better quality coal that left less ash, he said. Every day the plant burned 6,000 tons of coal. He had no idea how much ash that generated, but the stream of lorries to take it away was continuous.
The first coal-fired power station in Punjab was commissioned in Bathinda in 1974, followed by another in nearby Lehra Mohabat in 1998. There is a third to the east, at Rupnagar.
Tests on ground water in villages in Bathinda district found the highest average concentration of uranium - 56.95mcg/l - in the town of Bucho Mandi, a short distance from the Lehra Mohabat ash pond. Such a concentration of uranium means the lifetime cancer risk in the village was more than 153 times higher than in the normal population. Tests on ground water in the village of Jai Singh Wala, close to the Bathinda ash pond, showed an average level of 52.79mcg/l. People living there said they used the ash to spread on the roads and even on the floors of their homes.
Scientists in Punjab who have studied the presence of uranium in the state have dismissed the government denials as a whitewash. "If the government says there is a high level of uranium in an area that would create havoc - they don't want to openly say something like that," said Dr Chander Parkash, a wetland ecologist working at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.
Both he and Dr Surinder Singh, who works at the same university and has also carried out tests on the state's ground water, said it was clear that uranium was present in large quantities and should be investigated further.
Another scientist, Dr GS Dhillon, a former chief engineer with the irrigation department, is convinced that the uranium has come from the power stations and accuses the authorities of failing to control the ash ponds, which he believes have contaminated the ground water.
Their concerns are bolstered by a report from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's leading state organisation for nuclear research, published last month in the Russian Academy of Sciences' Thermal Engineering journal. The report's author, DA Krylov, raised serious doubts about the safety of coal-fired thermal power stations (TPSs), concluding that radiation from ash residues and from chimney emissions built up around coal-fired power plants and posed an additional risk to those living and working in the area.
"Natural radionuclides contained in coals concentrate in ash-and-slag wastes and gas-aerosol emissions as these coals are fired at TPSs, with the result that an elevated man-made radiation background builds up around TPSs," the report stated. The situation became worse, the report said, if ash was used as a construction material or as a filling material for roads.
A previous report in the magazine Scientific American, citing various sources, claimed that fly ash emitted by power plants "carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy", adding: "When coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/30-1
India's Generation of Children Crippled by Uranium Waste
Observer investigation uncovers link between dramatic rise in birth defects in Punjab and pollution from coal-fired power stations
by Gethin Chamberlain
Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country's borders.
Gurpreet Sigh, 7, who has cerebral palsy and microcephaly, and is from Sirsar, 50km from the Punjabi town of Bathinda. He is being treated at the Baba Farid centre for Special Children in Bathinda Photograph: Gethin Chamberlain.
Some sit mutely, staring into space, lost in a world of their own; others cry out, rocking backwards and forwards. Few have any real control over their own bodies. Their anxious parents fret over them, murmuring soft words of encouragement, hoping for some sort of miracle that will free them from a nightmare.
Health workers in the Punjabi cities of Bathinda and Faridkot knew something was terribly wrong when they saw a sharp increase in the number of birth defects, physical and mental abnormalities, and cancers. They suspected that children were being slowly poisoned.
But it was only when a visiting scientist arranged for tests to be carried out at a German laboratory that the true nature of their plight became clear. The results were unequivocal. The children had massive levels of uranium in their bodies, in one case more than 60 times the maximum safe limit.
The results were both momentous and mysterious. Uranium occurs naturally throughout the world, but is normally only present in low background levels which pose no threat to human health. There was no obvious source in the Punjab that could account for such high levels of contamination.
And if a few hundred children - spread over a large area - were contaminated, how many thousands more might also be affected? Those are questions the Indian authorities appear determined not to answer. Staff at the clinics say they were visited and threatened with closure if they spoke out. The South African scientist whose curiosity exposed the scandal says she has been warned by the authorities that she may not be allowed back into the country.
But an Observer investigation has now uncovered disturbing evidence to suggest a link between the contamination and the region's coal-fired power stations. It is already known that the fine fly ash produced when coal is burned contains concentrated levels of uranium and a new report published by Russia's leading nuclear research institution warns of an increased radiation hazard to people living near coal-fired thermal power stations.
The test results for children born and living in areas around the state's power stations show high levels of uranium in their bodies. Tests on ground water show that levels of uranium around the plants are up to 15 times the World Health Organisation's maximum safe limits. Tests also show that it extends across large parts of the state, which is home to 24 million people.
The findings have implications not only for the rest of India - Punjab produces two-thirds of the wheat in the country's central reserves and 40% of its rice - but for many other countries planning to build new power plants, including China, Russia, India, Germany and the US. In Britain, there are plans for a coal-fired station at the Kingsnorth facility in Kent.
The victims are being treated at the Baba Farid centres for special children in Bathinda - where there are two coal-fired thermal plants - and in nearby Faridkot. It was staff at those clinics who first voiced concerns about the increasing numbers of admissions involving severely handicapped children. They were being born with hydrocephaly, microcephaly, cerebral palsy, Down's syndrome and other complications. Several have already died.
Dr Pritpal Singh, who runs the Faridkot clinic, said the numbers of children affected by the pollution had risen dramatically in the past six or seven years. But he added that the Indian authorities appeared determined to bury the scandal. "They can't just detoxify these kids, they have to detoxify the whole Punjab. That is the reason for their reluctance," he said. "They threatened us and said if we didn't stop commenting on what's happening, they would close our clinic.
"But I decided that if I kept silent it would go on for years and no one would do anything about it. If I keep silent then the next day it will be my child. The children are dying in front of me."
Dr Carin Smit, the South African clinical metal toxicologist who arranged for the tests to be carried out in Germany, said that the situation could no longer be ignored. "There is evidence of harm for these children in my care and... it is an imperative that their bodies be cleaned up and their metabolisms be supported to deal with such a devastating presence of radioactive material," she said.
"If the contamination is as widespread as it would appear to be - as far west as Muktsar on the Pakistani border, and as far east as the foothills of Himachal Pradesh - then millions are at high risk and every new baby born to a contaminated mother is at risk."
In the Faridkot centre last week, Harmanbir Kaur, 15, was rocking gently backwards and forwards. When her test results came back, they showed she had 10 times the safe limit of uranium in her body. Her brother, Naunihal Singh, six, has double the safe level.
Harmanbir was born in Muktsar, 25 miles from Faridkot. Her mother, Kulbir Kaur, 37, watched her slowly degenerate from a healthy baby into the girl she is today, dribbling constantly, unable to feed herself, lost in a world of her own. "God knows what sin I have committed. When we go to our village people say there is a curse of God on you, but I don't believe so," she said. "Every part of this area is affected. We never imagined that there would be uranium in our kids."
A few miles down the road in Bathinda, Sukhminder Singh, 48, a farmer, watched his son Kulwinder, 13, staring into space while curling his hands up under his chin. Tests showed Kulwinder has 19 times the maximum safe level of uranium in his body. He has cerebral palsy and has already had seven operations to unbend his arms and legs.
"The government should investigate it because if our child is affected it will also affect future generations," he said. "What are they waiting for? How many children do they want to be affected? Another generation? I can leave the house for work, but my wife is always with him. Sometimes she cries and asks why God is playing with our luck. Every morning he sends a new trouble."
Doni Choudhary, aged 15 months, is waiting to be tested, though staff say he shows similar symptoms to those who have tested positive and are treating him for suspected uranium poisoning. His mother, Neelum, 22, from the state capital, Chandigarh, says he was born with hydrocephaly. His legs are useless.
"He is dependent on others. After me, who can care for him?" Neelum asks. "He tries to speak but he can't express himself and my heart cries. When will he understand that his legs don't work? What will he feel?"
India's reluctance to acknowledge the problem is hardly unexpected: the country is heavily committed to an expansion of thermal plants in Punjab and other states. Neither was it any surprise when a team of scientists from the Department of Atomic Energy visited the area and concluded that while the concentration of uranium in drinking water was "slightly high", there was "nothing to worry" about. Yet some tests recorded levels of uranium in the ground water as high as 224mcg/l (micrograms per litre) - 15 times higher than the safe level of 15mcg/l recommended by the WHO. (The US Environmental Protection Agency sets a maximum safe level of 20mcg/l.)
Some scientists have proposed that the ground water may have been contaminated by contact with granite rocks that rise above the ground about 150 miles away to the south in the Tosham hills, in Haryana state. A continuation of these rocks is believed to run deep below the thick alluvial deposits that form the plains of Punjab.
Increasing demands for water, in particular to irrigate the rice crop, have led to greater dependence on tube wells. That in turn is depleting the water table in the state at an alarming rate - by at least 30cm a year, according to one study - with the result that water is being drawn from ever deeper levels. However, this theory seems to be in conflict with evidence from parents of many of the children, who say they use the mains supply, which comes from other sources.
There have also been claims that the contamination may have been exacerbated by depleted uranium carried on the wind from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a seminar in Amritsar in April, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, a former chief of the naval staff, suggested that areas within a 1,000-mile radius of Kabul - including Punjab - may be affected by depleted uranium. Although the prevailing monsoon winds blow either from the north-east or the south-west, there are times when a depression originating in the Mediterranean can result in rainfall in Punjab.
Meanwhile, smoke continues to pour from the power station chimneys and lorries shuttle backwards and forwards, taking away the fly ash to be mixed into cement at the neighbouring Ambuja factory. Inside the plant last week, there was ash everywhere, forming drifts, clinging to the skin, getting into the throat.
Ravindra Singh, the plant's security officer, said that most of the ash went to the cement works, while the rest was dumped in ash ponds. It would be more efficient to burn better quality coal that left less ash, he said. Every day the plant burned 6,000 tons of coal. He had no idea how much ash that generated, but the stream of lorries to take it away was continuous.
The first coal-fired power station in Punjab was commissioned in Bathinda in 1974, followed by another in nearby Lehra Mohabat in 1998. There is a third to the east, at Rupnagar.
Tests on ground water in villages in Bathinda district found the highest average concentration of uranium - 56.95mcg/l - in the town of Bucho Mandi, a short distance from the Lehra Mohabat ash pond. Such a concentration of uranium means the lifetime cancer risk in the village was more than 153 times higher than in the normal population. Tests on ground water in the village of Jai Singh Wala, close to the Bathinda ash pond, showed an average level of 52.79mcg/l. People living there said they used the ash to spread on the roads and even on the floors of their homes.
Scientists in Punjab who have studied the presence of uranium in the state have dismissed the government denials as a whitewash. "If the government says there is a high level of uranium in an area that would create havoc - they don't want to openly say something like that," said Dr Chander Parkash, a wetland ecologist working at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.
Both he and Dr Surinder Singh, who works at the same university and has also carried out tests on the state's ground water, said it was clear that uranium was present in large quantities and should be investigated further.
Another scientist, Dr GS Dhillon, a former chief engineer with the irrigation department, is convinced that the uranium has come from the power stations and accuses the authorities of failing to control the ash ponds, which he believes have contaminated the ground water.
Their concerns are bolstered by a report from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's leading state organisation for nuclear research, published last month in the Russian Academy of Sciences' Thermal Engineering journal. The report's author, DA Krylov, raised serious doubts about the safety of coal-fired thermal power stations (TPSs), concluding that radiation from ash residues and from chimney emissions built up around coal-fired power plants and posed an additional risk to those living and working in the area.
"Natural radionuclides contained in coals concentrate in ash-and-slag wastes and gas-aerosol emissions as these coals are fired at TPSs, with the result that an elevated man-made radiation background builds up around TPSs," the report stated. The situation became worse, the report said, if ash was used as a construction material or as a filling material for roads.
A previous report in the magazine Scientific American, citing various sources, claimed that fly ash emitted by power plants "carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy", adding: "When coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/30-1
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Hot Town
Comment: This is scary uranium mining history, remember history likes to repent itself when it comes to uranium mining and milling! People knew uranium mill tailings were radioactive but corporations used them in building schools and business with little regards to people health! The article states facts that uranium is the cause of birth defects from the uranium tailings! The local uranium group have said they will not mine uranium if it is not safe, well let us take a trip to Grand Junction, and find the sick children!Monday, Dec. 20, 1971
Except on the coldest days of the Colorado winter, the doors of the Pomona Elementary School annex, on the outskirts of Grand Junction, are opened during recess. The reason is that the building is radioactive. Unless the rooms are aired, radioactive gases and particles seeping through the floors cause the radiation in the school rooms to rise dangerously above safe levels. In fact, during the summer months when the school is closed up, radiation rises to a level 18 times higher than the guideline established by the U.S. Surgeon General.
Pomona Elementary's problem is shared in less acute form by buildings in at least a dozen other Colorado communities and by Grand Junction itself, an important uranium-producing town until the ore petered out in the mid-1960s.
The villain is uranium "tailings" —the gray, sandy debris that piled up in small mountains beside the mills as refuse from the mining operations. The tailings were known to contain some residual radiation, but below levels the AEC then considered to be a health or safety hazard. As the town boomed along with its uranium mines, Grand Junction contractors seized on the tailings as a convenient and cheap source of landfill and concrete mix.
Over the years, thousands of tons of tailings went into the construction of schools, homes, commercial buildings, sidewalks, an airfield and a shopping mall.
Cleft Palates.
Cleft Palates.
By 1961, says the AEC, "form letters" were mailed to health officials warning that while the agency did not have regulatory jurisdiction over the tailings, their radium content could be hazardous; health officials, however, claim they never received the letters. In 1966 the Colorado state health department attached test film badges to several buildings in downtown Grand Junction; the badges promptly turned black from radioactivity. This led the state to pass legislation requiring contractors to get permits before using tailings in any project.
In 1970 a pediatrician in Grand Junction, Dr. Robert Ross, noticed an increase in the number of cleft palates and other birth defects in the area, and communicated his concern to Dr. C. Henry Kempe, chairman of the pediatrics department at the University of Colorado's Medical Center. Their joint studies, reported last October, indicated that the incidence of cleft lip and palate was almost twice as high in the Grand Junction area as for the rest of Colorado, the birth rate significantly lower, the death rate from congenital anomalies 50% higher.
But the town was slow to take alarm. Paul Hathaway, regional editor of Grand Junction's Daily Sentinel, explains: "Uranium turned this from a sleepy little cow town to a booming city. They accept it as part of their existence.
In 1970 a pediatrician in Grand Junction, Dr. Robert Ross, noticed an increase in the number of cleft palates and other birth defects in the area, and communicated his concern to Dr. C. Henry Kempe, chairman of the pediatrics department at the University of Colorado's Medical Center. Their joint studies, reported last October, indicated that the incidence of cleft lip and palate was almost twice as high in the Grand Junction area as for the rest of Colorado, the birth rate significantly lower, the death rate from congenital anomalies 50% higher.
But the town was slow to take alarm. Paul Hathaway, regional editor of Grand Junction's Daily Sentinel, explains: "Uranium turned this from a sleepy little cow town to a booming city. They accept it as part of their existence.
That's why you don't see a lot of immediate concern about the tailings." As Frank Folk, who is principal of a local school, puts it: "I'd just as soon be here in the clear air with the tailings as in some of those cities with their smog."
Radon Daughters.
Radon Daughters.
Maybe so, but scientists are now seriously concerned about the long-term effects of such low-level radiation on individuals living and working in buildings in which tailings were used. Of about 5,000 such structures in the Grand Junction area between 1,500 and 2,000 have been found to contain radon gas. This gas is so penetrating that it can seep through foundations and into basements and other closed spaces. Even more ominous is the fact that radon gas breaks down into "radon daughters," highly radioactive substances that physicians believe cause genetic defects and cancer.
TIME Correspondent Ted Hall, who recently visited the town, reports that the mood there now is one of apprehension, confusion over how much radiation is actually dangerous, and anger.
"I'm not trying to become the Ralph Nader of radiation," explains Willis Stubbs, an insurance salesman whose four children attend Pomona Elementary, "but people need to be told to get the hell out from the tailings, or that it's all right." Both he and his wife have come to doubt the Surgeon General's guideline. Says Mrs. Stubbs: "They say chances of damage to the children is one in a million. Well, suppose your child is that one in a million? We happen to be parents and we are concerned about it." So are some local businessmen.
TIME Correspondent Ted Hall, who recently visited the town, reports that the mood there now is one of apprehension, confusion over how much radiation is actually dangerous, and anger.
"I'm not trying to become the Ralph Nader of radiation," explains Willis Stubbs, an insurance salesman whose four children attend Pomona Elementary, "but people need to be told to get the hell out from the tailings, or that it's all right." Both he and his wife have come to doubt the Surgeon General's guideline. Says Mrs. Stubbs: "They say chances of damage to the children is one in a million. Well, suppose your child is that one in a million? We happen to be parents and we are concerned about it." So are some local businessmen.
A bank has decided not to offer mortgages to home buyers until radiation readings have been made.
What to Do?
What to Do?
Remedies are not easy. Of course, entire structures can be torn down, but not many people want to do that. Alternatively, hot structures can be jacked up and the fill replaced with dirt. But all this is expensive, and neither the state nor the AEC has been eager to pick up the tab. The whole problem is confused by the continuing debate about how much radiation is dangerous—an incredibly difficult decision since effects may not show up for several generations.
Last week, AEC Chairman James Schlesinger visited Denver, where he discussed Grand Junction's troubles with Governor John Love and admitted that Grand Junction contractors, the state, and the AEC share a "moral responsibility" for the tailings.
Last week, AEC Chairman James Schlesinger visited Denver, where he discussed Grand Junction's troubles with Governor John Love and admitted that Grand Junction contractors, the state, and the AEC share a "moral responsibility" for the tailings.
He stressed that the radiation poses no "immediate" danger to residents. On the other hand, he said that radiation levels "are higher than we would prefer, so some remedial action is intended." When, he could not say—except to state that "there is presently no plan to provide funds from the Federal Government" for removing the tailings, which could cost as much as $20 million.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878989,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878989,00.html
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Radioactive Revival in New Mexico
Comment: The article below will be happening in Virginia if Moratorium on uranium is lifted. The local uranium company is giving money away to people, business and schools just like the uranium bunch out west. They are telling people who will living in site of the open pit uranium mine, that it will okay, the blasting will be just a puff!! No to Uranium mining and milling!!
By Shelley Smithson
This article appeared in the June 29, 2009 edition of The Nation.
June 10, 2009
Research support for this article was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
JANNA BROWER
Mitchell Capitan points to a flock of sheep grazing in the shadow of a sandstone mesa. The sheep belong to Capitan's family, along with a few head of cattle and twelve quarter horses standing in a corral near his mother-in-law's house in Crownpoint, New Mexico.
Radioactive Revival in New Mexico
Environment
Shelley Smithson: Navajos say "No!" as the return of uranium mining threatens to despoil their lands and health.
"All of this area," Capitan says, gesturing to the valley of sage and shrub brush below, "there's a lot of uranium underneath there. That's what they're after."
Capitan and his Navajo neighbors are battling a license granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI)--a subsidiary of a Texas company, Uranium Resources--one of several firms that have laid claim to the minerals beneath thousands of acres on and around the lands of the Navajo Nation and three American Indian pueblos in northwestern New Mexico. A group called the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining is suing the NRC to block mining in Crownpoint and another Navajo community. A panel of federal judges in Denver heard the case in May 2008 but has yet to issue a ruling.
A resurgence of interest in building nuclear power plants, touted as a nonpolluting alternative to carbon-fueled plants, has sparked a uranium rush. Since 2007 the NRC has received seventeen license applications for twenty-six new reactors, causing a flurry of applications for uranium mining permits across the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet. In February Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Energy Department would expedite the approval process for $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for utilities that are building nuclear plants. The guarantees, along with other Bush-era incentives, are meant to spur construction of new plants.
The anticipated rise in demand for uranium has led the industry back to the very places it deserted three decades ago when it abandoned hundreds of mines, seven polluted uranium mills, billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater and mountains of radioactive waste. Congress is only now beginning to press agencies to clean up the mess, an undertaking that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plenty of people in this economically distressed corner of New Mexico are thrilled about the 8,000 new jobs and $1 billion in economic benefits the uranium industry promises. They point to claims made by industry lobbyists in a concerted PR campaign that new technology will make mining safer and that cast doubt on the connection between uranium mining and the illnesses that plague people who worked in mines and mills or lived near them.
Many others, especially American Indians like Capitan, remain unconvinced. They are afraid the companies will leave behind another trail of environmental destruction, illness and death like that of thirty years ago.
Sitting in his wood-paneled office in Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley Jr., a tall, thin man with silver hair and a fierce opposition to uranium mining, declares, "I don't believe there is any safe technology that can be used to mine uranium. Many of my people died because of mining of uranium ore here on Navajo land. Back at that time, the US government did not apprise my people of the dangers that are inherent with the mining of uranium ore. And as a result, a lot of people came down with cancer." Shirley has watched several family members suffer from uranium-related illnesses. "It is devastating. It has wrecked the lives of our families," he says.
He rejects the idea that mining is needed because it will bring jobs to the Navajo Nation, where the unemployment rate is around 50 percent. "How much is a life worth?" he says.
"If you can show me the cure for the cancer that is caused by the uranium ore, I might have second thoughts about it," he says. Until then, the tribe will continue to fight the state and federal agencies that grant permits to uranium companies despite the opposition of American Indian communities.
Starting in 1942, much of the uranium used for atomic bombs being built in Los Alamos was mined in northwestern New Mexico. Between 1950 and 1979, the region yielded more yellowcake than any other place in the United States. Hundreds of uranium mines and seven mills--many of them on or near Indian land--stocked the government's cold war atomic arsenal and, eventually, the nation's nuclear power plants.
Though the region has always been poor, locals remember the uranium era as a prosperous time. People ate lunch at the Uranium Cafe in Grants, listened to country music on KMIN (pronounced K-mine) and built houses with scrap materials from the mines. On weekends Indian uranium workers and their families drove from the reservations to the border towns of Grants, Gallup and Farmington to shop.
But in 1979, everything changed. Public outcry over the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island plus construction cost overruns dealt the uranium industry a deathblow in a few short years. For thirty years no new nuclear plants were ordered in the United States. The nation's 104 nuclear reactors bought cheap surplus uranium from government stockpiles and later from dismantled Soviet-era nuclear warheads.
The first uranium boom left a toxic legacy to the people of the area. Uranium workers, inadequately protected from the dangers of mining and milling, developed a range of maladies.
Although the government knew of the health risks of radioactive dust--European studies from the 1920s and '30s had linked uranium mining with lung cancer--officials did not require mine companies to ventilate shafts or to limit worker exposure to radon, the radioactive gas released during mining. Duncan Holaday, an industrial engineer at the Public Health Service, discovered that radon levels in US mines in the 1940s were as high as those found in European mines in the 1920s. "He tried to convince the mine operators and the Atomic Energy Commission that they were going to have a big epidemic here if they didn't start ventilating the mines. But nobody paid much attention to him," says Dr. Victor Archer, now in his 80s and living in Salt Lake City. Archer worked with Holaday for nearly two decades on an epidemiological study for PHS on the relationship between radon and lung cancer. Though he knew the miners were at risk of developing lung cancer, Archer says he was not allowed to warn the 2,500 men in the study about their unsafe work environments. "It was understood if we upset the miners...then the mine operators would not let us examine the miners," he says.
The researchers repeatedly warned mine operators and state and federal mining officials of the dangers of working in unventilated mines. "We'd tell them about the European experience, and they'd say, 'Those foreigners are different from our miners,'" Archer recalls. "Mostly they would object because to ventilate would cost them money."
Just as the researchers warned, uranium workers developed lung cancers, as well as a long list of other ailments. In 1990, after fifteen years of litigation and lobbying by the families of deceased miners, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides payments of $100,000 to miners, millers and ore haulers who contracted specific lung diseases, as well as some millers and ore haulers diagnosed with certain renal diseases.
Congress recognized the government's failure to protect those who worked in "mines that were providing uranium for the primary use and benefit of the nuclear weapons program of the United States." But the act covers just a fraction of those afflicted only before 1971, when the government stopped buying uranium for its weapons program and passed standards to limit worker radiation exposure. Post-1971 workers who suffer from the same illnesses say they too should be compensated. They claim that the government's radiation limits were insufficient and that regulators did not force companies to follow rules intended to protect workers' health.
The new uranium rush has resurrected antagonisms among Indians, Anglos and Hispanics and sparked a bitter war over the future of uranium mining in New Mexico. Many Indians say they were, and still are, treated as second-class citizens in stores, restaurants and businesses in border towns, where their sales taxes support city coffers. Non-Indians complain that Indians living on reservations do not pay property taxes yet are able to vote in school bond referendums, which often benefit reservation communities. There's anger, too, about the prevalence of drunk driving on the roads between the reservations, where alcohol is illegal, and the border towns, where bars are plentiful. But few issues evoke more emotion than the prospect of uranium mining.
On a Saturday afternoon in June 2008, racial tensions simmered when 700 people packed into the high school gymnasium in Grants. The Route 66 town is home to 8,800 people, two prisons, a handful of 1950s-era motels and twice as many fast food restaurants. On one side of the gym sat a crowd of mostly American Indian residents, who had come from nearby communities to voice their opposition to proposed uranium mining near Mount Taylor. The 11,000-foot snowcapped peak rises above the stark badlands between Grants and Albuquerque and is sacred to five tribes in the Southwest--the Navajos, Acomas, Lagunas, Zunis and Hopis. Last year the Navajo Nation joined twenty other Southwestern tribes in opposing mining on Mount Taylor. Indians claim that protection of the mountain is crucial to their religions and cultures.
Many Indians fear that pollution from uranium mines and mills could contaminate the mountain springs, rivers and aquifers that supply water for crop irrigation, homes and businesses on their land. The Navajo Nation Council banned new uranium mining on Navajo land in 2005.
"If you contaminate our groundwater, where do we go for water after that?" Shirley demands.
In the bleachers on the other side of the gym sat mostly Anglo and Hispanic residents from Grants and neighboring towns. They were there to speak in support of mining and against a state plan to set aside the top of Mount Taylor as a culturally protected landmark.
In June state officials voted to make the cultural listing of the mountain permanent, a decision that could hinder uranium mining on private and public land within and adjacent to the cultural-property boundaries. That possibility led to a fierce campaign by the uranium industry that pitted Anglo and Hispanic landowners against the state and the tribes. Commenting on the move to designate Mount Taylor a traditional cultural property, industry lobbyist Marita Noon called it "a sneak attack, sadly perpetrated largely by Native Americans against white men."
James Martinez of Albuquerque says state officials are placing Indian culture above all others. Martinez's great-great-grandfather was born in a cave at the base of Mount Taylor on land given to Spanish settlers 300 years ago by the king of Spain. Twenty thousand acres were granted to several families, including the Martinez clan. But over the years, three-quarters of the Juan Tafoya Land Grant, as it was called, was lost to back taxes and sloppy paperwork or unscrupulously taken by Anglo lawyers and ranchers.
"Thirty-five years ago, my father made [the land grant] into a corporation," Martinez explains. "He brought a lot of people back who lost their rights there."
The land grant now totals 4,500 acres, including the village of Marquez--population zero. The Martinez family lived in Marquez until after World War II, when they moved to Albuquerque. Now all that remains of the village are a few empty houses, a vacant church, a closed post office and an abandoned school. Just beyond the village, beneath the icy mountain streams and ponderosa pines, is a uranium ore body estimated at 15 million pounds.
When Martinez was a teenager, a uranium company sank a shaft and built a mill near Marquez, but before any ore was pulled out of the ground the price of uranium collapsed. So too did the family's dream of becoming wealthy. Then, four years ago, after two decades of uranium prices that averaged around $10 a pound, the price of uranium started to climb, reaching an all-time high in 2007 of $138 a pound. (It has since fallen with the price of other energy commodities to $49 a pound.) The 500 shareholders of the Juan Tafoya Land Grant voted to lease the land to Neutron Energy, a private uranium company based in Phoenix. The company, which plans to operate a shaft mine and a mill in the area, promises that technology and safer operating procedures will make mining and milling environmentally benign.
Martinez's son Amadeo is already benefiting. Neutron gave him a scholarship to attend the University of New Mexico, where he is studying geology in hopes of working for the mine company. He plans to move back to the village of his ancestors someday. "I know the Natives. We've been accused [by them] up front of only looking for the fast dollar," says James Martinez's wife, Patricia. "We see it as a way to help the economy, to help our future, the next generation."
From Linda Evers's front yard she can see the snow-covered cap of Mount Taylor to the east. To the north her view is blocked by a ten-foot red fence that separates her property from the boundaries of the Homestake Mill Superfund site. Today all that remains of the closed uranium mill eight miles northwest of Grants are a few metal buildings and two earthen impoundments. Covering 240 acres, the Homestake impoundments, holding piles of tailings, are filled with 20 million tons of radioactive sludge generated by thirty years of milling uranium.
Evers, a former miner, miller and ore hauler, says she became a member of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment because she wanted the community to remember that uranium has sickened Anglos, Hispanics and Indians. Evers, who is Anglo, believes her degenerative bone disease and persistent skin rashes are linked to uranium exposure. "My daughter was born with no hips at all," says Evers, whose son was also born with birth defects.
The multicultural alliance is composed of Indian, Anglo and Hispanic members of five grassroots organizations opposed to new mining. The group has given tours of contaminated areas to state officials, worked with lawmakers to craft legislation and testified before the state legislature about widespread groundwater pollution at Homestake Mill.
Despite a three-decade remediation effort that has been overseen by the NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency, contamination from Homestake's tailings has migrated to five regional aquifers. A 2008 report by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry declares the site a public health hazard and states, "even upon completion of the remediation, the levels of uranium and selenium will be above drinking water standards."
This year, state environmental officials ordered people in Evers's neighborhood to stop drinking well water. In addition to contamination from mill tailings, state officials are investigating whether radioactive pollution from abandoned uranium mines north of Homestake might be contributing to toxic underground plumes.
Fifty miles west of Grants, in the Navajo community of Church Rock, soil testing in 2007 revealed radiation levels so high that EPA crews wearing hazardous materials suits brought in backhoes to remove dirt from the yards of five families. The homes are located between two abandoned mines and a former mill that was the site of the largest radioactive spill in US history.
The residential dirt removal cost the government $1 million and was part of an EPA plan to clean up one of the two mines. Despite opposition from the community and the Navajo Nation, the NRC issued a permit allowing HRI of Dallas to begin new mining at the other abandoned mine.
Larry King, who lives nearby, testified in 2007 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is pressing the EPA to clean up more than 500 abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation. King said, "The NRC ruled that the radiation from the [old mine] site doesn't have to be included in [the permit's] public dose calculations, that the wastes there are now part of 'background,' as if the Great Spirits had placed them there from the beginning of time.... I guess [NRC's] mandate to protect the public health and safety just doesn't apply to we Navajos."
King's neighbor Edith Hood, who was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2006, also implored Congress to halt the NRC's approval of new mines in Navajo communities. "My father has pulmonary fibrosis. My mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. My grandmother and grandfather died of lung cancer. Many of my family members and neighbors are sick, but we don't know what from," Hood said. "How can they open new mines when we haven't even addressed the health impacts and environmental damage of the old ones?"
According to the EPA, long-term exposure to uranium and its radioactive byproducts has been linked to chronic lung and renal diseases and cancers. Uranium exposure may also cause tumors in the tissues where new blood cells are formed and in the lymphatic system. Long-term exposure to high levels of radium--a byproduct of uranium mining--may cause anemia, cataracts, fractured teeth, head and nasal passage tumors and bone cancer.
A 2000 study reported that two Navajo children exposed to uranium while in the womb suffered deadly central nervous system disorders. Their mother had unknowingly led the family's sheep to water at uranium-contaminated springs and had drunk the water herself. Hood said she fears that traditional Navajo families, who raise and butcher sheep, may be eating meat that is poisoned with uranium and other heavy metals.
A federally funded project at the University of New Mexico is trying to determine if there is a connection between drinking uranium-tainted water and kidney disease. Many Navajos in northwestern New Mexico do not have running water, so they haul water in fifty-gallon barrels from public wells. Nearly one-quarter of these unregulated water sources likely contains unsafe levels of uranium, according to the US Indian Health Service.
It's 10:02 on a crisp fall morning in Grants. Radio KMIN is on the air, playing "goo-ooo-ood country music."
"Thanks for tuning in to KMIN," says the effervescent announcer and station president, Derek Underhill. "It's time for our public-service program on energy. Our experts are brought to you by CARE." The mining-industry-backed CARE, the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy, is sponsoring an eight-week "educational series" on the community's AM radio station, featuring one-hour interviews with uranium executives and mining-friendly lawyers, economists, academics and scientists.
The guest this morning is Steven Brown, a health physicist who has worked in the uranium industry for forty years. Brown is discussing a 1999 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. "[The report] states, and I quote, 'No human cancer of any type has ever been seen as a result of exposure to natural or depleted uranium.'" Brown does not provide the next sentence in the report, which states, "Uranium can decay into other radionuclides, which can cause cancer if you are exposed to enough of them for a long enough period."
Downplaying uranium-related illnesses and environmental pollution on the radio is only one move in the industry's public-relations playbook. In public hearings and industry-sponsored "educational meetings," the executive director of CARE, Marita Noon, claims environmentalists are using Indians as pawns to block mining and to keep the state's residents poor. Noon, who was a Christian motivational speaker before becoming a self-proclaimed "advocate for energy," says God put uranium in New Mexico so that Americans can wean themselves from Middle Eastern oil and Russian uranium.
Industry lobbyists also make their case to regulators and legislators. In March a New Mexico House committee tabled a bill that would have empowered state regulators to force companies to clean up their messes from decades ago. "The industry came out hard against it," says Nadine Padilla, a lobbyist for several grassroots groups, including the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment. Another failed bill would have created a permanent fund to clean up abandoned mines that are contributing to groundwater pollution.
At an NRC hearing in Albuquerque last fall, uranium lobbyist Adella Duran demonstrated the cozy relationship between the industry and some lawmakers. Duran stood at the podium and told an NRC panel that she had been asked by representative to the New Mexico Legislature John Heaton to speak on his behalf.
"He wasn't able to be here tonight," she explained. "He knew that I was going to be here in a different capacity, and so he has asked me on his behalf, for the record, to read a letter that he has written to [NRC] Chairman Klein."
After reading the statement by Heaton, who is chair of the State House Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, she moved to the other side of the podium and spoke on behalf of her clients, the uranium industry, urging the NRC to expedite its permit process for new mines.
The industry is peddling influence at the local level, too. Both Homestake and HRI have hired the Albuquerque public relations firm D.W. Turner to bolster their images as good corporate citizens. Homestake established a "Little Miners" program to fund classroom projects at the Grants elementary school; both firms support numerous nonprofit organizations, from literacy programs to domestic violence shelters to crisis pregnancy centers.
"They're going around handing out checks to people, to businesses, nongovernmental organizations, a lot of social programs that have been starved," says Chris Shuey, a community organizer with the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based advocacy group. Shuey, who is often referred to by CARE's executive director as an "environmental zealot," says he has watched the debate devolve into an atmosphere of racial divisiveness and hate. "There's been demonizing and just meanness and ruthlessness against people who have been upstanding citizens," he says. "They say there are rabid environmentalists. There is nobody as rabid as these pro-uranium people."
Mitchell Capitan stands at the end of a washboard road and points to a large water tank perched atop a mesa in his hometown of Crownpoint. There are no major rivers in this part of the state, and since most people do not have a well, every day residents from the surrounding area come to the community well and haul water to their homes. An estimated 15,000 residents draw water from the Crownpoint well.
Mining "is going to be a big risk because our main aquifer is the sole drinking water for this community," says Capitan. "We have good clean water."
Instead of sinking a shaft or digging a pit, HRI plans to extract uranium by injecting bicarbonate solution into the sandstone aquifer--just one-quarter mile from the municipal well. The injection will release uranium from the rocks, where it has been encased for eons.
The company claims the process, called in situ recovery (ISR), is as safe as pumping baking soda underground. But the solution also mobilizes heavy metals, including arsenic, selenium and molybdenum, all of which are pumped to the surface then back into the ground after the uranium is extracted. Opponents worry that water contaminated with uranium and heavy metals will travel through underground channels to the village well 1,500 feet away, just as radioactive plumes from mines and mills have sullied aquifers to the south in the Grants and Church Rock areas.
HRI's parent company, Uranium Resources, has used the technology for thirty years at mines in South Texas. Richard Abitz, a geochemist who advises opponents of ISR mining in Texas, Colorado and on the Sioux Indian Reservation in Nebraska, says no ISR operation has ever restored the underground water at a mine site to its original condition. State and federal regulators routinely amend allowable levels of uranium and heavy metals after restoration efforts fall short, he said. In Texas, Goliad and Kleberg counties are trying to force uranium companies, including Uranium Resources, to clean up aquifer contamination from previous ISR operations.
Meanwhile, the NRC is considering a plan that would expedite the environmental review process for ISR operations nationwide, a move opposed by the New Mexico Environment Department. At a hearing on the issue last year, Capitan stood up and implored Navajos to unite against uranium mining. "Let's be banded together in one and protect our land and our water, because water is sacred," he said.
"How about if there was no water?" Capitan continued. "We can't live. We might have a million dollars right here, and I'm thirsty--which one am I going to take? I'm going to drink that water."
About Shelley Smithson
Shelley Smithson, a freelance writer in Urbana, Illionis, teaches journalism at the University of Illinois. more...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090629/smithson/single
By Shelley Smithson
This article appeared in the June 29, 2009 edition of The Nation.
June 10, 2009
Research support for this article was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
JANNA BROWER
Mitchell Capitan points to a flock of sheep grazing in the shadow of a sandstone mesa. The sheep belong to Capitan's family, along with a few head of cattle and twelve quarter horses standing in a corral near his mother-in-law's house in Crownpoint, New Mexico.
Radioactive Revival in New Mexico
Environment
Shelley Smithson: Navajos say "No!" as the return of uranium mining threatens to despoil their lands and health.
"All of this area," Capitan says, gesturing to the valley of sage and shrub brush below, "there's a lot of uranium underneath there. That's what they're after."
Capitan and his Navajo neighbors are battling a license granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI)--a subsidiary of a Texas company, Uranium Resources--one of several firms that have laid claim to the minerals beneath thousands of acres on and around the lands of the Navajo Nation and three American Indian pueblos in northwestern New Mexico. A group called the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining is suing the NRC to block mining in Crownpoint and another Navajo community. A panel of federal judges in Denver heard the case in May 2008 but has yet to issue a ruling.
A resurgence of interest in building nuclear power plants, touted as a nonpolluting alternative to carbon-fueled plants, has sparked a uranium rush. Since 2007 the NRC has received seventeen license applications for twenty-six new reactors, causing a flurry of applications for uranium mining permits across the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet. In February Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Energy Department would expedite the approval process for $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for utilities that are building nuclear plants. The guarantees, along with other Bush-era incentives, are meant to spur construction of new plants.
The anticipated rise in demand for uranium has led the industry back to the very places it deserted three decades ago when it abandoned hundreds of mines, seven polluted uranium mills, billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater and mountains of radioactive waste. Congress is only now beginning to press agencies to clean up the mess, an undertaking that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plenty of people in this economically distressed corner of New Mexico are thrilled about the 8,000 new jobs and $1 billion in economic benefits the uranium industry promises. They point to claims made by industry lobbyists in a concerted PR campaign that new technology will make mining safer and that cast doubt on the connection between uranium mining and the illnesses that plague people who worked in mines and mills or lived near them.
Many others, especially American Indians like Capitan, remain unconvinced. They are afraid the companies will leave behind another trail of environmental destruction, illness and death like that of thirty years ago.
Sitting in his wood-paneled office in Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley Jr., a tall, thin man with silver hair and a fierce opposition to uranium mining, declares, "I don't believe there is any safe technology that can be used to mine uranium. Many of my people died because of mining of uranium ore here on Navajo land. Back at that time, the US government did not apprise my people of the dangers that are inherent with the mining of uranium ore. And as a result, a lot of people came down with cancer." Shirley has watched several family members suffer from uranium-related illnesses. "It is devastating. It has wrecked the lives of our families," he says.
He rejects the idea that mining is needed because it will bring jobs to the Navajo Nation, where the unemployment rate is around 50 percent. "How much is a life worth?" he says.
"If you can show me the cure for the cancer that is caused by the uranium ore, I might have second thoughts about it," he says. Until then, the tribe will continue to fight the state and federal agencies that grant permits to uranium companies despite the opposition of American Indian communities.
Starting in 1942, much of the uranium used for atomic bombs being built in Los Alamos was mined in northwestern New Mexico. Between 1950 and 1979, the region yielded more yellowcake than any other place in the United States. Hundreds of uranium mines and seven mills--many of them on or near Indian land--stocked the government's cold war atomic arsenal and, eventually, the nation's nuclear power plants.
Though the region has always been poor, locals remember the uranium era as a prosperous time. People ate lunch at the Uranium Cafe in Grants, listened to country music on KMIN (pronounced K-mine) and built houses with scrap materials from the mines. On weekends Indian uranium workers and their families drove from the reservations to the border towns of Grants, Gallup and Farmington to shop.
But in 1979, everything changed. Public outcry over the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island plus construction cost overruns dealt the uranium industry a deathblow in a few short years. For thirty years no new nuclear plants were ordered in the United States. The nation's 104 nuclear reactors bought cheap surplus uranium from government stockpiles and later from dismantled Soviet-era nuclear warheads.
The first uranium boom left a toxic legacy to the people of the area. Uranium workers, inadequately protected from the dangers of mining and milling, developed a range of maladies.
Although the government knew of the health risks of radioactive dust--European studies from the 1920s and '30s had linked uranium mining with lung cancer--officials did not require mine companies to ventilate shafts or to limit worker exposure to radon, the radioactive gas released during mining. Duncan Holaday, an industrial engineer at the Public Health Service, discovered that radon levels in US mines in the 1940s were as high as those found in European mines in the 1920s. "He tried to convince the mine operators and the Atomic Energy Commission that they were going to have a big epidemic here if they didn't start ventilating the mines. But nobody paid much attention to him," says Dr. Victor Archer, now in his 80s and living in Salt Lake City. Archer worked with Holaday for nearly two decades on an epidemiological study for PHS on the relationship between radon and lung cancer. Though he knew the miners were at risk of developing lung cancer, Archer says he was not allowed to warn the 2,500 men in the study about their unsafe work environments. "It was understood if we upset the miners...then the mine operators would not let us examine the miners," he says.
The researchers repeatedly warned mine operators and state and federal mining officials of the dangers of working in unventilated mines. "We'd tell them about the European experience, and they'd say, 'Those foreigners are different from our miners,'" Archer recalls. "Mostly they would object because to ventilate would cost them money."
Just as the researchers warned, uranium workers developed lung cancers, as well as a long list of other ailments. In 1990, after fifteen years of litigation and lobbying by the families of deceased miners, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides payments of $100,000 to miners, millers and ore haulers who contracted specific lung diseases, as well as some millers and ore haulers diagnosed with certain renal diseases.
Congress recognized the government's failure to protect those who worked in "mines that were providing uranium for the primary use and benefit of the nuclear weapons program of the United States." But the act covers just a fraction of those afflicted only before 1971, when the government stopped buying uranium for its weapons program and passed standards to limit worker radiation exposure. Post-1971 workers who suffer from the same illnesses say they too should be compensated. They claim that the government's radiation limits were insufficient and that regulators did not force companies to follow rules intended to protect workers' health.
The new uranium rush has resurrected antagonisms among Indians, Anglos and Hispanics and sparked a bitter war over the future of uranium mining in New Mexico. Many Indians say they were, and still are, treated as second-class citizens in stores, restaurants and businesses in border towns, where their sales taxes support city coffers. Non-Indians complain that Indians living on reservations do not pay property taxes yet are able to vote in school bond referendums, which often benefit reservation communities. There's anger, too, about the prevalence of drunk driving on the roads between the reservations, where alcohol is illegal, and the border towns, where bars are plentiful. But few issues evoke more emotion than the prospect of uranium mining.
On a Saturday afternoon in June 2008, racial tensions simmered when 700 people packed into the high school gymnasium in Grants. The Route 66 town is home to 8,800 people, two prisons, a handful of 1950s-era motels and twice as many fast food restaurants. On one side of the gym sat a crowd of mostly American Indian residents, who had come from nearby communities to voice their opposition to proposed uranium mining near Mount Taylor. The 11,000-foot snowcapped peak rises above the stark badlands between Grants and Albuquerque and is sacred to five tribes in the Southwest--the Navajos, Acomas, Lagunas, Zunis and Hopis. Last year the Navajo Nation joined twenty other Southwestern tribes in opposing mining on Mount Taylor. Indians claim that protection of the mountain is crucial to their religions and cultures.
Many Indians fear that pollution from uranium mines and mills could contaminate the mountain springs, rivers and aquifers that supply water for crop irrigation, homes and businesses on their land. The Navajo Nation Council banned new uranium mining on Navajo land in 2005.
"If you contaminate our groundwater, where do we go for water after that?" Shirley demands.
In the bleachers on the other side of the gym sat mostly Anglo and Hispanic residents from Grants and neighboring towns. They were there to speak in support of mining and against a state plan to set aside the top of Mount Taylor as a culturally protected landmark.
In June state officials voted to make the cultural listing of the mountain permanent, a decision that could hinder uranium mining on private and public land within and adjacent to the cultural-property boundaries. That possibility led to a fierce campaign by the uranium industry that pitted Anglo and Hispanic landowners against the state and the tribes. Commenting on the move to designate Mount Taylor a traditional cultural property, industry lobbyist Marita Noon called it "a sneak attack, sadly perpetrated largely by Native Americans against white men."
James Martinez of Albuquerque says state officials are placing Indian culture above all others. Martinez's great-great-grandfather was born in a cave at the base of Mount Taylor on land given to Spanish settlers 300 years ago by the king of Spain. Twenty thousand acres were granted to several families, including the Martinez clan. But over the years, three-quarters of the Juan Tafoya Land Grant, as it was called, was lost to back taxes and sloppy paperwork or unscrupulously taken by Anglo lawyers and ranchers.
"Thirty-five years ago, my father made [the land grant] into a corporation," Martinez explains. "He brought a lot of people back who lost their rights there."
The land grant now totals 4,500 acres, including the village of Marquez--population zero. The Martinez family lived in Marquez until after World War II, when they moved to Albuquerque. Now all that remains of the village are a few empty houses, a vacant church, a closed post office and an abandoned school. Just beyond the village, beneath the icy mountain streams and ponderosa pines, is a uranium ore body estimated at 15 million pounds.
When Martinez was a teenager, a uranium company sank a shaft and built a mill near Marquez, but before any ore was pulled out of the ground the price of uranium collapsed. So too did the family's dream of becoming wealthy. Then, four years ago, after two decades of uranium prices that averaged around $10 a pound, the price of uranium started to climb, reaching an all-time high in 2007 of $138 a pound. (It has since fallen with the price of other energy commodities to $49 a pound.) The 500 shareholders of the Juan Tafoya Land Grant voted to lease the land to Neutron Energy, a private uranium company based in Phoenix. The company, which plans to operate a shaft mine and a mill in the area, promises that technology and safer operating procedures will make mining and milling environmentally benign.
Martinez's son Amadeo is already benefiting. Neutron gave him a scholarship to attend the University of New Mexico, where he is studying geology in hopes of working for the mine company. He plans to move back to the village of his ancestors someday. "I know the Natives. We've been accused [by them] up front of only looking for the fast dollar," says James Martinez's wife, Patricia. "We see it as a way to help the economy, to help our future, the next generation."
From Linda Evers's front yard she can see the snow-covered cap of Mount Taylor to the east. To the north her view is blocked by a ten-foot red fence that separates her property from the boundaries of the Homestake Mill Superfund site. Today all that remains of the closed uranium mill eight miles northwest of Grants are a few metal buildings and two earthen impoundments. Covering 240 acres, the Homestake impoundments, holding piles of tailings, are filled with 20 million tons of radioactive sludge generated by thirty years of milling uranium.
Evers, a former miner, miller and ore hauler, says she became a member of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment because she wanted the community to remember that uranium has sickened Anglos, Hispanics and Indians. Evers, who is Anglo, believes her degenerative bone disease and persistent skin rashes are linked to uranium exposure. "My daughter was born with no hips at all," says Evers, whose son was also born with birth defects.
The multicultural alliance is composed of Indian, Anglo and Hispanic members of five grassroots organizations opposed to new mining. The group has given tours of contaminated areas to state officials, worked with lawmakers to craft legislation and testified before the state legislature about widespread groundwater pollution at Homestake Mill.
Despite a three-decade remediation effort that has been overseen by the NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency, contamination from Homestake's tailings has migrated to five regional aquifers. A 2008 report by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry declares the site a public health hazard and states, "even upon completion of the remediation, the levels of uranium and selenium will be above drinking water standards."
This year, state environmental officials ordered people in Evers's neighborhood to stop drinking well water. In addition to contamination from mill tailings, state officials are investigating whether radioactive pollution from abandoned uranium mines north of Homestake might be contributing to toxic underground plumes.
Fifty miles west of Grants, in the Navajo community of Church Rock, soil testing in 2007 revealed radiation levels so high that EPA crews wearing hazardous materials suits brought in backhoes to remove dirt from the yards of five families. The homes are located between two abandoned mines and a former mill that was the site of the largest radioactive spill in US history.
The residential dirt removal cost the government $1 million and was part of an EPA plan to clean up one of the two mines. Despite opposition from the community and the Navajo Nation, the NRC issued a permit allowing HRI of Dallas to begin new mining at the other abandoned mine.
Larry King, who lives nearby, testified in 2007 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is pressing the EPA to clean up more than 500 abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation. King said, "The NRC ruled that the radiation from the [old mine] site doesn't have to be included in [the permit's] public dose calculations, that the wastes there are now part of 'background,' as if the Great Spirits had placed them there from the beginning of time.... I guess [NRC's] mandate to protect the public health and safety just doesn't apply to we Navajos."
King's neighbor Edith Hood, who was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2006, also implored Congress to halt the NRC's approval of new mines in Navajo communities. "My father has pulmonary fibrosis. My mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. My grandmother and grandfather died of lung cancer. Many of my family members and neighbors are sick, but we don't know what from," Hood said. "How can they open new mines when we haven't even addressed the health impacts and environmental damage of the old ones?"
According to the EPA, long-term exposure to uranium and its radioactive byproducts has been linked to chronic lung and renal diseases and cancers. Uranium exposure may also cause tumors in the tissues where new blood cells are formed and in the lymphatic system. Long-term exposure to high levels of radium--a byproduct of uranium mining--may cause anemia, cataracts, fractured teeth, head and nasal passage tumors and bone cancer.
A 2000 study reported that two Navajo children exposed to uranium while in the womb suffered deadly central nervous system disorders. Their mother had unknowingly led the family's sheep to water at uranium-contaminated springs and had drunk the water herself. Hood said she fears that traditional Navajo families, who raise and butcher sheep, may be eating meat that is poisoned with uranium and other heavy metals.
A federally funded project at the University of New Mexico is trying to determine if there is a connection between drinking uranium-tainted water and kidney disease. Many Navajos in northwestern New Mexico do not have running water, so they haul water in fifty-gallon barrels from public wells. Nearly one-quarter of these unregulated water sources likely contains unsafe levels of uranium, according to the US Indian Health Service.
It's 10:02 on a crisp fall morning in Grants. Radio KMIN is on the air, playing "goo-ooo-ood country music."
"Thanks for tuning in to KMIN," says the effervescent announcer and station president, Derek Underhill. "It's time for our public-service program on energy. Our experts are brought to you by CARE." The mining-industry-backed CARE, the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy, is sponsoring an eight-week "educational series" on the community's AM radio station, featuring one-hour interviews with uranium executives and mining-friendly lawyers, economists, academics and scientists.
The guest this morning is Steven Brown, a health physicist who has worked in the uranium industry for forty years. Brown is discussing a 1999 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. "[The report] states, and I quote, 'No human cancer of any type has ever been seen as a result of exposure to natural or depleted uranium.'" Brown does not provide the next sentence in the report, which states, "Uranium can decay into other radionuclides, which can cause cancer if you are exposed to enough of them for a long enough period."
Downplaying uranium-related illnesses and environmental pollution on the radio is only one move in the industry's public-relations playbook. In public hearings and industry-sponsored "educational meetings," the executive director of CARE, Marita Noon, claims environmentalists are using Indians as pawns to block mining and to keep the state's residents poor. Noon, who was a Christian motivational speaker before becoming a self-proclaimed "advocate for energy," says God put uranium in New Mexico so that Americans can wean themselves from Middle Eastern oil and Russian uranium.
Industry lobbyists also make their case to regulators and legislators. In March a New Mexico House committee tabled a bill that would have empowered state regulators to force companies to clean up their messes from decades ago. "The industry came out hard against it," says Nadine Padilla, a lobbyist for several grassroots groups, including the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment. Another failed bill would have created a permanent fund to clean up abandoned mines that are contributing to groundwater pollution.
At an NRC hearing in Albuquerque last fall, uranium lobbyist Adella Duran demonstrated the cozy relationship between the industry and some lawmakers. Duran stood at the podium and told an NRC panel that she had been asked by representative to the New Mexico Legislature John Heaton to speak on his behalf.
"He wasn't able to be here tonight," she explained. "He knew that I was going to be here in a different capacity, and so he has asked me on his behalf, for the record, to read a letter that he has written to [NRC] Chairman Klein."
After reading the statement by Heaton, who is chair of the State House Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, she moved to the other side of the podium and spoke on behalf of her clients, the uranium industry, urging the NRC to expedite its permit process for new mines.
The industry is peddling influence at the local level, too. Both Homestake and HRI have hired the Albuquerque public relations firm D.W. Turner to bolster their images as good corporate citizens. Homestake established a "Little Miners" program to fund classroom projects at the Grants elementary school; both firms support numerous nonprofit organizations, from literacy programs to domestic violence shelters to crisis pregnancy centers.
"They're going around handing out checks to people, to businesses, nongovernmental organizations, a lot of social programs that have been starved," says Chris Shuey, a community organizer with the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based advocacy group. Shuey, who is often referred to by CARE's executive director as an "environmental zealot," says he has watched the debate devolve into an atmosphere of racial divisiveness and hate. "There's been demonizing and just meanness and ruthlessness against people who have been upstanding citizens," he says. "They say there are rabid environmentalists. There is nobody as rabid as these pro-uranium people."
Mitchell Capitan stands at the end of a washboard road and points to a large water tank perched atop a mesa in his hometown of Crownpoint. There are no major rivers in this part of the state, and since most people do not have a well, every day residents from the surrounding area come to the community well and haul water to their homes. An estimated 15,000 residents draw water from the Crownpoint well.
Mining "is going to be a big risk because our main aquifer is the sole drinking water for this community," says Capitan. "We have good clean water."
Instead of sinking a shaft or digging a pit, HRI plans to extract uranium by injecting bicarbonate solution into the sandstone aquifer--just one-quarter mile from the municipal well. The injection will release uranium from the rocks, where it has been encased for eons.
The company claims the process, called in situ recovery (ISR), is as safe as pumping baking soda underground. But the solution also mobilizes heavy metals, including arsenic, selenium and molybdenum, all of which are pumped to the surface then back into the ground after the uranium is extracted. Opponents worry that water contaminated with uranium and heavy metals will travel through underground channels to the village well 1,500 feet away, just as radioactive plumes from mines and mills have sullied aquifers to the south in the Grants and Church Rock areas.
HRI's parent company, Uranium Resources, has used the technology for thirty years at mines in South Texas. Richard Abitz, a geochemist who advises opponents of ISR mining in Texas, Colorado and on the Sioux Indian Reservation in Nebraska, says no ISR operation has ever restored the underground water at a mine site to its original condition. State and federal regulators routinely amend allowable levels of uranium and heavy metals after restoration efforts fall short, he said. In Texas, Goliad and Kleberg counties are trying to force uranium companies, including Uranium Resources, to clean up aquifer contamination from previous ISR operations.
Meanwhile, the NRC is considering a plan that would expedite the environmental review process for ISR operations nationwide, a move opposed by the New Mexico Environment Department. At a hearing on the issue last year, Capitan stood up and implored Navajos to unite against uranium mining. "Let's be banded together in one and protect our land and our water, because water is sacred," he said.
"How about if there was no water?" Capitan continued. "We can't live. We might have a million dollars right here, and I'm thirsty--which one am I going to take? I'm going to drink that water."
About Shelley Smithson
Shelley Smithson, a freelance writer in Urbana, Illionis, teaches journalism at the University of Illinois. more...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090629/smithson/single
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Jaduguda residents object to renewal of uranium mining lease
By admin on May 27th, 2009
Jamshedpur, May 27 (ANI): Residents of Jaduguda and nearby areas of Jamshedpur in Jharkhand staged a mass protest on Tuesday against the renewal of lease of uranium mining rights by the Uranium Corporation of India (UCIL).
People protested on the sidelines of a public hearing of the UCIL held in Jamshedpur to discuss renewal of lease of mining areas in Jadugoda.
Locals and members of Jharkhand Organisation against Radiation (JOAR) shouted slogans to register their protest against renewal of mining and alleged they had been harmed by uranium radiation in a lot of ways.
Members and supporters of JOAR have been spearheading the anti-radiation movement and voicing their objection to the renewal of mining.
“There are a lot of problems here. Women are not able conceive. Handicapped children are born. A lot of people are dying because of cancer and tuberculosis caused due to radiation and other odd affects of Uranium,” said Manoj Kumar, a resident.
However, the UCIL dismissed the allegations of the NGOs that people were suffering from radiation effects of uranium mining.
S B Momik, General Manager, Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL), Jaduguda said that the grade of mining done by the corporation is not the cause of illness of the people.he uranium deposits at Jaduguda in Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, has been under exploitation since 1962.
The uranium deposits at Bhatin and Narwapahar are currently being explored and mined.re from the three deposits is treated in a mill at Jaduguda and the annual yield of uranium is 300 tonnes which is more than sufficient to meet expected requirements of Atomic Energy Commission for decades. (ANI)
http://silverscorpio.com/jaduguda-residents-object-to-renewal-of-uranium-mining-lease/
Jamshedpur, May 27 (ANI): Residents of Jaduguda and nearby areas of Jamshedpur in Jharkhand staged a mass protest on Tuesday against the renewal of lease of uranium mining rights by the Uranium Corporation of India (UCIL).
People protested on the sidelines of a public hearing of the UCIL held in Jamshedpur to discuss renewal of lease of mining areas in Jadugoda.
Locals and members of Jharkhand Organisation against Radiation (JOAR) shouted slogans to register their protest against renewal of mining and alleged they had been harmed by uranium radiation in a lot of ways.
Members and supporters of JOAR have been spearheading the anti-radiation movement and voicing their objection to the renewal of mining.
“There are a lot of problems here. Women are not able conceive. Handicapped children are born. A lot of people are dying because of cancer and tuberculosis caused due to radiation and other odd affects of Uranium,” said Manoj Kumar, a resident.
However, the UCIL dismissed the allegations of the NGOs that people were suffering from radiation effects of uranium mining.
S B Momik, General Manager, Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL), Jaduguda said that the grade of mining done by the corporation is not the cause of illness of the people.he uranium deposits at Jaduguda in Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, has been under exploitation since 1962.
The uranium deposits at Bhatin and Narwapahar are currently being explored and mined.re from the three deposits is treated in a mill at Jaduguda and the annual yield of uranium is 300 tonnes which is more than sufficient to meet expected requirements of Atomic Energy Commission for decades. (ANI)
http://silverscorpio.com/jaduguda-residents-object-to-renewal-of-uranium-mining-lease/
Sunday, May 24, 2009
W.A.R.N. Health Investigation 1980 - Summary
Comment: People of Pittsylvania County, the gov't will NOT protect you from Uranium Mining & milling ruining our water, air and land. Uranium Corporations have a long history ruining people lives and have convinced or bribe our leaders to weaken air, land, and water standards!!!!May 23, 2009 by admin1
A copy of the groundbreaking Women’s Health & Water Report detailing high levels of chemicals present in Pine Ridge water such as uranium, dioxin & ‘1080′, as well as nuclear waste from a nearby U.S. Air Force Gunnery Range. The report details the effects of these poisons on the people and their concerns for their future health:
PINE RIDGE HEALTH INVESTIGATION: Health Problems Proven
In a one month period in the late 1979, 14 women or 38% of the pregnant women of the Pine Ridge Reservation miscarried. Medical personnel were concerned. The people of the reservation were concerned.
That incident brought to a head health issues that had been developing for some time among the Lakota people. The elders said that cancer was a “white man’s disease” - that it had not existed in previous generations. Yet each family seemed to have had at least one death due to the disease in the present generation. Heart problems and respiratory problems seemed to be on the rise. Birth defects - club feet, heart defects, cleft palate - were noticed increasingly. The rate of complications of pregnancy seemed higher… and miscarriages were forcing the birth rate down.
Women of All Red Nations, a grassroots organization of Indian women, began a health investigation. Random interviews of Pine Ridge families were done and compared with a similar group of families on the Cheyenne River Reservation in northern South Dakota. The Pine Ridge interviews revealed a rate of cancer, heart ailments, and miscarriage far greater than the Cheyenne River group.
PINE RIDGE HEALTH INVESTIGATION: Health Problems Proven
In a one month period in the late 1979, 14 women or 38% of the pregnant women of the Pine Ridge Reservation miscarried. Medical personnel were concerned. The people of the reservation were concerned.
That incident brought to a head health issues that had been developing for some time among the Lakota people. The elders said that cancer was a “white man’s disease” - that it had not existed in previous generations. Yet each family seemed to have had at least one death due to the disease in the present generation. Heart problems and respiratory problems seemed to be on the rise. Birth defects - club feet, heart defects, cleft palate - were noticed increasingly. The rate of complications of pregnancy seemed higher… and miscarriages were forcing the birth rate down.
Women of All Red Nations, a grassroots organization of Indian women, began a health investigation. Random interviews of Pine Ridge families were done and compared with a similar group of families on the Cheyenne River Reservation in northern South Dakota. The Pine Ridge interviews revealed a rate of cancer, heart ailments, and miscarriage far greater than the Cheyenne River group.
Water samples from the Cheyenne River and a subsurface source at the Pine Ridge community of Red Shirt, tested at a Rapid City lab revealed a gross alpha radioactivity level of 19 and 15 picocuries, respectively. Federal safety regulations state that a reading greater than 5 picocuries is considered dangerous to life.
These results confirmed fears held by the Lakota people since uranium mining and development had begun in the southern Black Hills, just 75 to 100 miles west of the reservation. Would they suffer from the radioactive wastes and effects of this industry?
These results confirmed fears held by the Lakota people since uranium mining and development had begun in the southern Black Hills, just 75 to 100 miles west of the reservation. Would they suffer from the radioactive wastes and effects of this industry?
It is well documented, that on June 11, 1962, 200 tons of radioactive mill tailings at the uranium mill in Edgemont, South Dakota washed into the Cheyenne River and traveled into the Angostora Reservoir. The Cheyenne River flows from the Reservoir down through the Hills and across the reservation. The Cheyenne passes within a few hundred feet of the Red Shirt well where the contaminated water sample was taken. That well supplies water to the community.
Also in question is the purity of the Arikaree and Ogalala aquifers which provide ground water for the reservation and its people. These aquifers, which extend under a large area of south-western South Dakota, may be affected by exploratory drilling being done by energy corporations in the area. Such drilling may expose water supplies to veins of uranium and the emission of radon gas, a radioactive uranium by-product which dissolves easily in water.
Many people on the reservation also believe that the U.S. Gunnery Range, an area of the reservation retained by the U.S. Air Gunnery Range, an Area of the reservation retained by the U.S. Air Force, is being used as a nuclear and chemical waste dump. They question the impact that this might be having on their water, air, and health.
In March, 1980 W.A.R.N. demanded immediate alternative sources of water for the Pine Ridge reservation until the source of these health problems and water contamination could be isolated and averted. The Environmental Protection Agency, Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs all denied their request. The Indian Health Service, responsible by federal statute for protection of Indian health, denied the existence of any health-problem.
W.A.R.N. investigators, however, obtained IHS records and statics under the Freedom of Information Act which revealed rates of miscarriage on Pine Ridge even times the national average and infant mortality rates at more than twice the national rate.
Dr. Jeffrey Olenick, a physician at the Pine Ridge IHS hospital, reported unusual excessive bleeding after miscarriages of Pine Ridge women and called for a comprehensive health study. Ann Corral, Director of Field Health Nursing at the hospital cited high cancer and diabetes rates among the elderly and high rates of reproductive cancer. In an interview with W.A.R.N. attorney Jacqueline Huber, IHS Aberdeen area Acting Director Dr. E.S. Rabeau, mentioned high rates of bone cancer on the reservation. (Experts cite bone marrow and reproductive organ tissue as the most sensitive to develop cancer as a result of contact with radiation).
Preliminary water tests done by IHS using EPA taken water samples revealed gross alpha levels in wells in Oglala and Manderson also above federal maximum safety levels and thus there is no cause for concern. The people remain unconvinced and ask why these health problems exist and what relationship they have too high gross alpha and uranium levels in the water. EPA has responded that it will monitor the water for one year and then determine what action should be taken.
W.A.R.N. investigators have now revealed new causes for concern for water contamination on the reservation. Toxic chemicals 2-4D and 2-4-5T are used widely in the Pine Ridge area. One of the active ingredients, dioxin, has been shown to have caused impotency, respiratory and nerve disorders, and cancer in military veterans exposed to it during the Vietnam War. “1080″, another extremely toxic chemical, has been recommended for prairie dog control on the reservation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Toxaphene, a poison that may bring on brain hemorrhage or cancer of the liver, is rumored to be used as a grasshopper spray on the reservation. Engineers at the Indian Health Service have admitted that many wells on Pine Ridge are improperly capped and that, as a result, any of these surface contaminants could filter down into water supplies or, of course, contaminate surface waters.
In June of 1980, IHS revealed water test results for the Pine Ridge community of Slim Buttes (another western community) which indicate gross alpha levels three times the federal safety maximum IHS has agreed to drill a new well for that community. The sewage system at the town of Pine Ridge has backed up, dumping raw sewage into area streams.
Alternative water supplies have yet not been received and are still being demanded. IHS claims lack of money to provide this water or to establish a preventive health study or program at Pine Ridge. The Aberdeen Area Office, however, admits having turned one million dollars in unused monies back to the U.S. Government in the last fiscal year.
Due to the local dissatisfaction with the response of federal agencies, W.A.R.N. is presently organizing an independent comprehensive investigation by medical and environmental experts into the health problems on Pine Ridge, their causes, and their relationship to environmental contaminants on the reservation. Also in response to local concerns, the reservation tribal government has appointed a tribal water quality investigator and has created a legal project to work toward the return of the Gunnery Range area of the reservation. It is hoped that with or without federal agency support, the people will have answers to their questions and health problems soon.
A Downloadable copy of the 1980 WARN Report on Health Issues
WARN Report 1980 - Summary
http://www.republicoflakotah.com/?p=1667
Also in question is the purity of the Arikaree and Ogalala aquifers which provide ground water for the reservation and its people. These aquifers, which extend under a large area of south-western South Dakota, may be affected by exploratory drilling being done by energy corporations in the area. Such drilling may expose water supplies to veins of uranium and the emission of radon gas, a radioactive uranium by-product which dissolves easily in water.
Many people on the reservation also believe that the U.S. Gunnery Range, an area of the reservation retained by the U.S. Air Gunnery Range, an Area of the reservation retained by the U.S. Air Force, is being used as a nuclear and chemical waste dump. They question the impact that this might be having on their water, air, and health.
In March, 1980 W.A.R.N. demanded immediate alternative sources of water for the Pine Ridge reservation until the source of these health problems and water contamination could be isolated and averted. The Environmental Protection Agency, Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs all denied their request. The Indian Health Service, responsible by federal statute for protection of Indian health, denied the existence of any health-problem.
W.A.R.N. investigators, however, obtained IHS records and statics under the Freedom of Information Act which revealed rates of miscarriage on Pine Ridge even times the national average and infant mortality rates at more than twice the national rate.
Dr. Jeffrey Olenick, a physician at the Pine Ridge IHS hospital, reported unusual excessive bleeding after miscarriages of Pine Ridge women and called for a comprehensive health study. Ann Corral, Director of Field Health Nursing at the hospital cited high cancer and diabetes rates among the elderly and high rates of reproductive cancer. In an interview with W.A.R.N. attorney Jacqueline Huber, IHS Aberdeen area Acting Director Dr. E.S. Rabeau, mentioned high rates of bone cancer on the reservation. (Experts cite bone marrow and reproductive organ tissue as the most sensitive to develop cancer as a result of contact with radiation).
Preliminary water tests done by IHS using EPA taken water samples revealed gross alpha levels in wells in Oglala and Manderson also above federal maximum safety levels and thus there is no cause for concern. The people remain unconvinced and ask why these health problems exist and what relationship they have too high gross alpha and uranium levels in the water. EPA has responded that it will monitor the water for one year and then determine what action should be taken.
W.A.R.N. investigators have now revealed new causes for concern for water contamination on the reservation. Toxic chemicals 2-4D and 2-4-5T are used widely in the Pine Ridge area. One of the active ingredients, dioxin, has been shown to have caused impotency, respiratory and nerve disorders, and cancer in military veterans exposed to it during the Vietnam War. “1080″, another extremely toxic chemical, has been recommended for prairie dog control on the reservation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Toxaphene, a poison that may bring on brain hemorrhage or cancer of the liver, is rumored to be used as a grasshopper spray on the reservation. Engineers at the Indian Health Service have admitted that many wells on Pine Ridge are improperly capped and that, as a result, any of these surface contaminants could filter down into water supplies or, of course, contaminate surface waters.
In June of 1980, IHS revealed water test results for the Pine Ridge community of Slim Buttes (another western community) which indicate gross alpha levels three times the federal safety maximum IHS has agreed to drill a new well for that community. The sewage system at the town of Pine Ridge has backed up, dumping raw sewage into area streams.
Alternative water supplies have yet not been received and are still being demanded. IHS claims lack of money to provide this water or to establish a preventive health study or program at Pine Ridge. The Aberdeen Area Office, however, admits having turned one million dollars in unused monies back to the U.S. Government in the last fiscal year.
Due to the local dissatisfaction with the response of federal agencies, W.A.R.N. is presently organizing an independent comprehensive investigation by medical and environmental experts into the health problems on Pine Ridge, their causes, and their relationship to environmental contaminants on the reservation. Also in response to local concerns, the reservation tribal government has appointed a tribal water quality investigator and has created a legal project to work toward the return of the Gunnery Range area of the reservation. It is hoped that with or without federal agency support, the people will have answers to their questions and health problems soon.
A Downloadable copy of the 1980 WARN Report on Health Issues
WARN Report 1980 - Summary
http://www.republicoflakotah.com/?p=1667
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Environmental Influences on the Health of Children
Comment: interesting reads about children & uranium!
FIRST CASE STUDY: McCLURE CRESCENT
McClure Crescent is a housing development built on a farm used by the Radium Luminous Industries (RLI), which operated in Toronto in the 1940’s painting radium on dials to make them glow in the dark. They painted the cockpit dials for the bombers in World War II. After the war, RLI was shut down, and the area was used as a disposal site for the radium source, its decay products and contaminated work place materials. The contamination was first identified in 1945 by the Canadian Foreign Exchange Control Board, which had been investigating the RLI for the National Research Council. There was incomplete follow up of the concerns.
The Province of Ontario was warned again about the potentially serious contamination in 1975, and then again in I980, when two Ryerson University Journalism students, tipped off by former RLI workers, brought the problem to public attention. The Housing Subdivision, McClure Crescent, was built by the Ontario Housing Corp., which had not been told about the contamination. Homes on the contaminated land were sold under a Home Ownership Made Easy Lottery in 1973. There were 270 homes allocated through the lottery, most of which were won by young couples just starting their families.
After the 1980 public disclosure, MacLaren Engineers tested the area for the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), the Federal Regulatory Agency in Canada. It found one place, behind the homes at 110 and 112 McClure, with gamma radiation levels 50 x normal soil levels (50 mSv), and many other homes with levels 2 – 3 x normal (2 to 3 mSv per year). The AECB agreed to remove 4000 tons of contaminated backyard soil from the area. At the same time, it declared that there was no threat to the health of anyone in the neighborhood. At the time the AECB maximum permissible radiation exposure level was five times normal terrestrial background (5 mSv per year). In 1990, this recommended permissible maximum level was reduced to about one times background (one mSv per year). This means that in 1980, except for the buried radium source, the pollution was legal, and after 1990, although it was still technically legal, the Government had declared its intention to implement the new lower standards, which would make the contamination illegal.
EDA Engineering was brought in by individual families to determine the extent of contamination on their property, and they confirmed the MacLaren findings. The Nuclear chemistry laboratory at the University of Waterloo confirmed that the radium in the soil was about one tenth the concentration found in uranium mine tailings piles, which are considered to be quite dangerous. However, unlike uranium mine tailings, this radioactive debris was in the backyard of homes containing young children.
COMMUNITY DIAGNOSIS: At the request of parents who were worried about possible health effects on their children, IICPH undertook urine analysis for polonium 210, a decay product of radium, and blood counts with differential. Blood changes are known to occur at low level radiation exposure. Uranium or radium that is not excreted from the body, becomes incorporated in bone. Its decay product, radon gas, is able to escape the bone and both radon and its decay products can be excreted in urine. Through chemical and radiochemical techniques, it is possible to test for a decay product of the radon gas, polonium 210, as an indicator of the incorporation of uranium or radium in bone. Each participant also completed a short questionnaire, noting the length of residency, age, sex, ethnicity and relevant socioeconomic information.
URINE ANALYSIS: In the first test, urine samples were collected from about 12 children, and the samples combined. The AECB had refused to have the urine measured at the government laboratory, so IICPH requested measurement at the University of Waterloo laboratory. Dr. Sharma, who did the chemical analysis, combined the samples. He did not expect to find anything, and was surprised to find high gross alpha and beta radiation counts. Because of this positive finding we again collected 24-hour urine samples for three exposed children, one control adult and one control child. The children were designated low or high exposed based on the engineering analysis of their family home property. However, it is acknowledged that children are quite mobile in a neighborhood. The measurements were as follows:
CONTROL ADULT 0.1 (+ or 0.12) pCi per 24 hours
CONTROL CHILD 0.0 (+ or 0.12) pCi per 24 hours
FIRST LOW EXPOSED CHILD 0.17 (+ or 0.12) pCi per 24 hours
SECOND LOW EXPOSED CHILD 0.40 (+ or 0.13) pCi per 24 hours
HIGH EXPOSED CHILD 2.30 (+ or 0.15) pCi per 24 hours
Uranium workers’ levels of Lead 210 in urine is reported in the literature as between 0.47 and 5.0 pCi per sample, with an average of 1.16 pCi per sample. The expected value of lead 210 in urine for an adult non-smoker is 0.05 pCi per sample. In a study undertaken in Elliot Lake for adults, including smokers and non-smokers, researchers found an average of 0.2 pCi per sample of Lead 210. The McClure Crescent children had levels of Lead 210 in urine, which indicated above normal, even comparable to a uranium miner’s exposure to the decay product of radium.
BLOOD COUNT: Fifty-eight children, between ages 5 and 15 years, gave blood samples to the MDS laboratory for Complete Blood Counts and Differentials. The Laboratory handled the blood in the same way for each child’s count. Each child had three tests, done one week apart and the findings in absolute count were averaged for the study. Children with a sore throat, fever or possible cold/flu at the time of testing or within two weeks prior to the testing were eliminated from the study by the MDS professional who took the blood. Exposure level for the child was estimated on the basis of the engineering findings on the child’s home property. Children were divided into two categories, except for the preliminary study of trend with dose, in which case three categories were used.
In the preliminary examination of the data, we separated the exposed group into three categories: those with buried radioactivity on their home property (HIGHER EXPOSURE), those with only surface contamination as determined by the engineering study (MEDIUM EXPOSURE), and those with no contamination on home property, designated LOW EXPOSURE. The average white blood counts for children in the three exposure categories in the preliminary test were:
NORMAL 4,300 TO 10,800 per microlitre of blood
LOW EXPOSURE 7,552 per microlitre of blood
MEDIUM EXPOSURE: 6,409 per microlitre of blood
HIGH EXPOSURE 6,323 per microlitre of blood
An F-test showed that the linear trend with dose was significant (probability of 0.02). The differences were most dramatic for the monocyte, a type of white cell produced by stem cells located in bone marrow. The Lead 210 is stored by the body in bone, and the monocyte stem cells are know to be highly radio-sensitive. The trend with dose for monocyte count was statistically significant by an F- test on the 1 % level (probability 0.006).
AVERAGE MONOCYTE COUNT PER MICROLITRE OF BLOOD:
LOW EXPOSURE 386
MEDIUM EXPOSURE 346
HIGHER EXPOSURE 271
These findings were unaffected when controlled for race, age or ethnicity. Socioeconomic status in the neighborhood was uniform.
Some children had clinically low monocyte counts, below 200 per microlitre of blood. Four children were referred to medical follow up.
There were 24 children on uncontaminated property (called lower exposure) and 34 living on contaminated property (the combined medium and high exposure groups). Our findings of the differences in monocyte counts for unexposed vs exposed children were as follows:
CATEGORY MEASURED Contaminated Property Uncontaminated Property
Number of Children 34 24
Number with at least one low monocyte count 26(76.5%) 10(41.7%)
Number with at least two low monocyte counts 26(76.5%) 10(41.7%)
Number with at least two low monocyte counts 11(32.4%) 2(8.3%)
Number with three low monocyte counts 2(5.9%) None
A zero monocyte count 8(23.5%) None
Total number of observations 101 64
Number of observation monocyte counts <200>1.5 miles from dump. 7 0.087 pCi/sample
All non-smokers in home. 20 0.162 pCi/sample
Smoker(s) in home. 4 0.140 pCi/sample
Missing answer. 10 0.371 pCi/sample
There was no follow up to this study. In fact, the US government opposed the testing of the children and went so far as to; cancel urine testing for the site clean up workers; close the urine analysis laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory (which was doing all of the urine analysis for uranium workers in the US); and, fire the researcher who had been doing the analyses. This action was taken subsequent to the researcher agreement to test the children. This researcher taught Dr. Hari Sharma, a nuclear chemist at the University of Waterloo, Canada, to do the Lead 210 testing so that all of our analyses used his methodology. The findings are therefore comparable with published data on uranium workers in the US.
There was an unusually high number of childhood cancers reported for the Canonsburg community prior to the clean up, but no thorough study of this was done. The dump had been in the neighborhood since about 1910. Dr. Radford, then at the University of Pittsburgh, included the community in a thyroid abnormality and cancer study he was supervising for student researchers at the time. The Canonsburg population showed a higher than expected level of thyroid abnormalities and cancers. (Evelyn O. Talbott et al, Problems in Determining Health Effects of a Community Exposed to Toxic Waste, Department of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh.) However, no distinction was made in this study between those born in the area, and therefore potentially exposed in utero, and those born elsewhere. No mechanism for this effect was given.
THIRD CASE STUDY: BROCK WEST MUNICIPAL WASTE LANDFILL
This municipal landfill, located in a rural area of Pickering, outside of Toronto, was given a Certificate of Approval in April 1973. The area was later developed, and the landfill site is now within 500 meters of homes. According to the original plans, the landfill would be open for five years. However, it was used for more than twenty years and, in 1988 it was reported to be seriously leaking. Plumes were identified moving through Metro Toronto Conservation Authority lands to the Duffins Creek. Area children were known to play near or even in the Creek.
A random sample of residents was chosen to fill out a questionnaire which included socioeconomic information on the family, life-style and hobby questions, detailed information on potential household pollutants, school information, outdoor habits and local area potential hazards. A sub-study was included with one child per household chosen in a systematic way so as to neither over-represent those with medical problems nor to over-emphasize households, which might have indoor pollution problems. Detailed medical and life style information on this representative child was collected.
A trend toward more asthma and more eczema was found with three surrogate levels of exposure to the landfill leachate: 1. Plays in or near the Duffin Creek; 2. Does not play near Duffin Creek, but Mother reports odors from the landfill detected in the home, 3. Neither of these two reported. All questionnaires were filled out by the mothers in the randomly chosen households.
The risk of asthma in children who play in or near the Duffin Creek is twice the asthma risk for children who do not play in or near the Duffin creek. This finding was statistically significant on the 5% level. The risk of eczema of these children was also doubled, and was statistically significant on the 5% level. The intermediate level of exposure had an intermediate rate of asthma and eczema.
This research was also resisted by governments. Because of this resistance, the methodology which had consisted of participatory research using local health professionals and volunteers, was scrutinized by the local University Environmental Health Department. They found a potential bias in collection, since the citizens had tired of keeping records on responses. However, internal checks on the data showed that the data was most likely randomly collected since the randomly designated children had a normal sex ratio. There had been no mandate to assure this outcome.
Although the government did not accept the study, they acted to close the landfill.
OTHER RESEARCH:
The International Institute of Concern for Public Health has undertaken other research on the environmental influence on the health of children, which can be found in publications referenced below. The Wisconsin study of the death rate of low-birth-rate babies seems to indicate that separating infant mortality rate by birth weight category in routine vital statistics reporting would (unfortunately) be helpful in assessing air pollution. Since a baby’s death certificate does not ordinarily contain the birth weight, this would require a simple change of forms.
The research which the Institute undertook in the Marshall Islands, where residents tried to inhabit Islands which had heavy nuclear fallout after the atmospheric tests at Bikini, showed the same monocyte abnormalities noted at McClure Crescent and Canonsburg.
These residents were not in the initial fallout and did not live on the contaminated Island until after the US Government had declared them safe.
A major study of uranium contamination on the Mississauga Reserve in Northern Ontario is unpublished at the request of the Native Band involved in the study. However, requests for copies the study can be made to the Chief, only if the findings will assist other communities struggling with uranium pollution. The Mississauga Reserve is across the highway and down wind from a uranium processing plant. In this investigation, a grid over the reserve was used to determine the pattern of deposition of the uranium dust and isopleths were made to guide the People in locating their homes and vegetable gardens and in choosing areas for picking herbal medicines and sweet grass for their ceremonies.
Studies of the Mississauga Reserve residents for monocyte depletion and uranium in urine were undertaken and indicated residential contamination, which was internal, and especially affecting the children. In this case study the Band used several interventions including:
Moving the children’s daycare centre away from a contaminated area; Substituting distilled water for drinking and cooking purposes in homes for all children. Within three months on the distilled water, the monocytopenia on the Reserve disappeared. The children’s counts had averaged 270 per microlitre blood, and they were raised to an averaged 690 per microlitre of blood. This was more than a substitution for local water, since the main pathways for internal contamination on the Reserve were via air and local produce, not water. Distilled water is known to leach inorganic heavy metals from organic material. This increase is also too large an increase to be attributed solely to a placebo effect.
In another project which the Institute undertook in Bukit Merah, Malaysia, a community exposed to the Asian Rare Earth Co., a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi Company, the primary exposures of the community were to radon gas and thorium, both wastes of the chemical separating process. The 60 children, who were tested for total blood count and differential, had an average monocyte count of 207 per microlitre of blood. The expected average for children would be 325. The range of monocyte counts was 72 to 495, as against the normal 200 to 800 per microlitre of blood. One hundred seventy one (171) children in a neighboring village, Carey Island, were also tested. These children were exposed to a palm oil factory, and agricultural pesticides and herbicides, but not radioactive heavy metals. These children had a lower socioeconomic status than the study group, and their nutritional status was lower. However, their blood counts, and the monocyte count in particular, were normally distributed.
The IPOH High Court in Malaysia closed down the Asian Rare Earth factory for two years, for the cleanup and construction of a waste disposal building. The Bukit Merah children were tested three months after the factory-resumed operations (1987) and then again one year later (1988). The progressive deterioration was astonishing:
Characteristic 1987 1988
of Children tested
60 44
< 100 per microlitre 6 (10.0%) 13 (29.5%)
< 200 per microlitre 29 (43.9%) 25 (56.8%)
About 39% of the Bukit Merah children suffered from a triad of mild lymphadenopathy, congested turbinates and recurrent rhinitis. Less than 4% of the 171 Carey Island children presented with these symptoms. All children in the study had normal temperatures and were without obvious cold or sore throat symptoms. In a follow-up visit to Malaysia in 1989, it was found that two children, 5 and 7 years old, had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. A 19-year-old man, born in Bukit Merah and a life long inhabitant, was also diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Another 5-year-old child developed a malignant brain tumor. A two-year-old child died of septicemia, and a 22-year-old worker, from the A.R.E. factory, considered by his peers to be very healthy, died with a diagnosis of meningoencephalitis. On admission to the hospital, the workers blood count was reported as abnormally low in view of his overwhelming infection (6,600 per microlitre blood). According to the Malaysian statistics, the elevated leukemia rate alone in this population of 15,000, had a probability of 3 in 100,000 of happening by chance. The expected rate was 0.03 cases per year.
It is my hope that more such biomarkers of exposure will be developed, and more community health interventions will be discovered and undertaken at an early stage in the development of environmentally related disease. I hope also that further studies and confirmation of my work will be undertaken, and that new techniques to diagnose and treat communities at risk from pollution will be a major focus of future medical research.
CONCLUSIONS:
Environmental Health is becoming a new discipline in its own right, different from Occupational Health. I believe that Environmental Health efforts will more and more come to rely on biomarkers of exposure rather than gross biological end points; such a severe tissue damage or cancer deaths. The child with its sensitivity and rapid growth rate will become the most important indicator of community health, and will become the focus of major preventive health action.
Environmental health will need to focus on parameter shifts in the population rather than on the clinically abnormal few. For example, when an individuals’ normal monocyte count is about 400 per microlitre of blood, and due to bone incorporation of uranium it drops to 250 per microlitre of blood, he or she would have a bio-marker of exposure but not be clinically ill. The case is obviously clinically more important for the individual whose borderline monocyte count prior to the exposure, moves into moncytopenia. However, in terms of the health of the community, `community-shift’ is the focus and not the plight of the individual and, community intervention is the response. The entire community needs assistance, not only those who fall below clinical guidelines. The individual care can be relegated to the usual physician patient relationship. This means carefully distinguishing between a normally distributed community parameter with a few abnormal out-layers, and a clearly distinguishable bell curve moved from its normal mean value. It is also possible to have communities with bimodal characteristics, i.e. a subgroup has the bio-marker for exposure. This is a new field of health investigation, which requires new thinking and new tools.
In this paper four potential bio-markers have been noted: monocyte count, death rate of low birth weight infants, incidence rate of asthma, and incidence rate of eczema.
References:
“Environmental Influence on Survival of Low Birth Weight Infants in Wisconsin in 1963-1975” R. Bertell, N. Jacobson and M. Stogre. International Perspectives in Public Health Vol 1, issue 2 1984. #“Internal Bone Seeking Radio nuclides and Monocyte Counts” R. Bertell. International Perspectives in Public Health Vol. 9,1993. #_Health Profile of Area Children._ Prepared for Pickering-Ajax Citizens Together for the Environment by the IICPH, May 1995. #_Health 2000: Report to the Mississauga First Nation._ June 1993. Available through requests to Chief Douglas Daybutch, Mississauga First Nation, Band Office, Box 1299, Village Road, Blind River ON P0R 1B6 CANADA. #_A Report to the U. S. Congress on the Health Problems of the Rongelap People,_ June 1989. Available from the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, Resource Centre, 517 College St. Suite 326, Toronto ON MGG 4A2 CANADA. #_Clinical Haematology_ by Eastham, R.D., Bristol, 1986 #_Haematology_ edited by William S. Bede, MIT Press, 1986, p.p. 8-16.
— IICPH
http://iicph.org/children_health
FIRST CASE STUDY: McCLURE CRESCENT
McClure Crescent is a housing development built on a farm used by the Radium Luminous Industries (RLI), which operated in Toronto in the 1940’s painting radium on dials to make them glow in the dark. They painted the cockpit dials for the bombers in World War II. After the war, RLI was shut down, and the area was used as a disposal site for the radium source, its decay products and contaminated work place materials. The contamination was first identified in 1945 by the Canadian Foreign Exchange Control Board, which had been investigating the RLI for the National Research Council. There was incomplete follow up of the concerns.
The Province of Ontario was warned again about the potentially serious contamination in 1975, and then again in I980, when two Ryerson University Journalism students, tipped off by former RLI workers, brought the problem to public attention. The Housing Subdivision, McClure Crescent, was built by the Ontario Housing Corp., which had not been told about the contamination. Homes on the contaminated land were sold under a Home Ownership Made Easy Lottery in 1973. There were 270 homes allocated through the lottery, most of which were won by young couples just starting their families.
After the 1980 public disclosure, MacLaren Engineers tested the area for the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), the Federal Regulatory Agency in Canada. It found one place, behind the homes at 110 and 112 McClure, with gamma radiation levels 50 x normal soil levels (50 mSv), and many other homes with levels 2 – 3 x normal (2 to 3 mSv per year). The AECB agreed to remove 4000 tons of contaminated backyard soil from the area. At the same time, it declared that there was no threat to the health of anyone in the neighborhood. At the time the AECB maximum permissible radiation exposure level was five times normal terrestrial background (5 mSv per year). In 1990, this recommended permissible maximum level was reduced to about one times background (one mSv per year). This means that in 1980, except for the buried radium source, the pollution was legal, and after 1990, although it was still technically legal, the Government had declared its intention to implement the new lower standards, which would make the contamination illegal.
EDA Engineering was brought in by individual families to determine the extent of contamination on their property, and they confirmed the MacLaren findings. The Nuclear chemistry laboratory at the University of Waterloo confirmed that the radium in the soil was about one tenth the concentration found in uranium mine tailings piles, which are considered to be quite dangerous. However, unlike uranium mine tailings, this radioactive debris was in the backyard of homes containing young children.
COMMUNITY DIAGNOSIS: At the request of parents who were worried about possible health effects on their children, IICPH undertook urine analysis for polonium 210, a decay product of radium, and blood counts with differential. Blood changes are known to occur at low level radiation exposure. Uranium or radium that is not excreted from the body, becomes incorporated in bone. Its decay product, radon gas, is able to escape the bone and both radon and its decay products can be excreted in urine. Through chemical and radiochemical techniques, it is possible to test for a decay product of the radon gas, polonium 210, as an indicator of the incorporation of uranium or radium in bone. Each participant also completed a short questionnaire, noting the length of residency, age, sex, ethnicity and relevant socioeconomic information.
URINE ANALYSIS: In the first test, urine samples were collected from about 12 children, and the samples combined. The AECB had refused to have the urine measured at the government laboratory, so IICPH requested measurement at the University of Waterloo laboratory. Dr. Sharma, who did the chemical analysis, combined the samples. He did not expect to find anything, and was surprised to find high gross alpha and beta radiation counts. Because of this positive finding we again collected 24-hour urine samples for three exposed children, one control adult and one control child. The children were designated low or high exposed based on the engineering analysis of their family home property. However, it is acknowledged that children are quite mobile in a neighborhood. The measurements were as follows:
CONTROL ADULT 0.1 (+ or 0.12) pCi per 24 hours
CONTROL CHILD 0.0 (+ or 0.12) pCi per 24 hours
FIRST LOW EXPOSED CHILD 0.17 (+ or 0.12) pCi per 24 hours
SECOND LOW EXPOSED CHILD 0.40 (+ or 0.13) pCi per 24 hours
HIGH EXPOSED CHILD 2.30 (+ or 0.15) pCi per 24 hours
Uranium workers’ levels of Lead 210 in urine is reported in the literature as between 0.47 and 5.0 pCi per sample, with an average of 1.16 pCi per sample. The expected value of lead 210 in urine for an adult non-smoker is 0.05 pCi per sample. In a study undertaken in Elliot Lake for adults, including smokers and non-smokers, researchers found an average of 0.2 pCi per sample of Lead 210. The McClure Crescent children had levels of Lead 210 in urine, which indicated above normal, even comparable to a uranium miner’s exposure to the decay product of radium.
BLOOD COUNT: Fifty-eight children, between ages 5 and 15 years, gave blood samples to the MDS laboratory for Complete Blood Counts and Differentials. The Laboratory handled the blood in the same way for each child’s count. Each child had three tests, done one week apart and the findings in absolute count were averaged for the study. Children with a sore throat, fever or possible cold/flu at the time of testing or within two weeks prior to the testing were eliminated from the study by the MDS professional who took the blood. Exposure level for the child was estimated on the basis of the engineering findings on the child’s home property. Children were divided into two categories, except for the preliminary study of trend with dose, in which case three categories were used.
In the preliminary examination of the data, we separated the exposed group into three categories: those with buried radioactivity on their home property (HIGHER EXPOSURE), those with only surface contamination as determined by the engineering study (MEDIUM EXPOSURE), and those with no contamination on home property, designated LOW EXPOSURE. The average white blood counts for children in the three exposure categories in the preliminary test were:
NORMAL 4,300 TO 10,800 per microlitre of blood
LOW EXPOSURE 7,552 per microlitre of blood
MEDIUM EXPOSURE: 6,409 per microlitre of blood
HIGH EXPOSURE 6,323 per microlitre of blood
An F-test showed that the linear trend with dose was significant (probability of 0.02). The differences were most dramatic for the monocyte, a type of white cell produced by stem cells located in bone marrow. The Lead 210 is stored by the body in bone, and the monocyte stem cells are know to be highly radio-sensitive. The trend with dose for monocyte count was statistically significant by an F- test on the 1 % level (probability 0.006).
AVERAGE MONOCYTE COUNT PER MICROLITRE OF BLOOD:
LOW EXPOSURE 386
MEDIUM EXPOSURE 346
HIGHER EXPOSURE 271
These findings were unaffected when controlled for race, age or ethnicity. Socioeconomic status in the neighborhood was uniform.
Some children had clinically low monocyte counts, below 200 per microlitre of blood. Four children were referred to medical follow up.
There were 24 children on uncontaminated property (called lower exposure) and 34 living on contaminated property (the combined medium and high exposure groups). Our findings of the differences in monocyte counts for unexposed vs exposed children were as follows:
CATEGORY MEASURED Contaminated Property Uncontaminated Property
Number of Children 34 24
Number with at least one low monocyte count 26(76.5%) 10(41.7%)
Number with at least two low monocyte counts 26(76.5%) 10(41.7%)
Number with at least two low monocyte counts 11(32.4%) 2(8.3%)
Number with three low monocyte counts 2(5.9%) None
A zero monocyte count 8(23.5%) None
Total number of observations 101 64
Number of observation monocyte counts <200>1.5 miles from dump. 7 0.087 pCi/sample
All non-smokers in home. 20 0.162 pCi/sample
Smoker(s) in home. 4 0.140 pCi/sample
Missing answer. 10 0.371 pCi/sample
There was no follow up to this study. In fact, the US government opposed the testing of the children and went so far as to; cancel urine testing for the site clean up workers; close the urine analysis laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory (which was doing all of the urine analysis for uranium workers in the US); and, fire the researcher who had been doing the analyses. This action was taken subsequent to the researcher agreement to test the children. This researcher taught Dr. Hari Sharma, a nuclear chemist at the University of Waterloo, Canada, to do the Lead 210 testing so that all of our analyses used his methodology. The findings are therefore comparable with published data on uranium workers in the US.
There was an unusually high number of childhood cancers reported for the Canonsburg community prior to the clean up, but no thorough study of this was done. The dump had been in the neighborhood since about 1910. Dr. Radford, then at the University of Pittsburgh, included the community in a thyroid abnormality and cancer study he was supervising for student researchers at the time. The Canonsburg population showed a higher than expected level of thyroid abnormalities and cancers. (Evelyn O. Talbott et al, Problems in Determining Health Effects of a Community Exposed to Toxic Waste, Department of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh.) However, no distinction was made in this study between those born in the area, and therefore potentially exposed in utero, and those born elsewhere. No mechanism for this effect was given.
THIRD CASE STUDY: BROCK WEST MUNICIPAL WASTE LANDFILL
This municipal landfill, located in a rural area of Pickering, outside of Toronto, was given a Certificate of Approval in April 1973. The area was later developed, and the landfill site is now within 500 meters of homes. According to the original plans, the landfill would be open for five years. However, it was used for more than twenty years and, in 1988 it was reported to be seriously leaking. Plumes were identified moving through Metro Toronto Conservation Authority lands to the Duffins Creek. Area children were known to play near or even in the Creek.
A random sample of residents was chosen to fill out a questionnaire which included socioeconomic information on the family, life-style and hobby questions, detailed information on potential household pollutants, school information, outdoor habits and local area potential hazards. A sub-study was included with one child per household chosen in a systematic way so as to neither over-represent those with medical problems nor to over-emphasize households, which might have indoor pollution problems. Detailed medical and life style information on this representative child was collected.
A trend toward more asthma and more eczema was found with three surrogate levels of exposure to the landfill leachate: 1. Plays in or near the Duffin Creek; 2. Does not play near Duffin Creek, but Mother reports odors from the landfill detected in the home, 3. Neither of these two reported. All questionnaires were filled out by the mothers in the randomly chosen households.
The risk of asthma in children who play in or near the Duffin Creek is twice the asthma risk for children who do not play in or near the Duffin creek. This finding was statistically significant on the 5% level. The risk of eczema of these children was also doubled, and was statistically significant on the 5% level. The intermediate level of exposure had an intermediate rate of asthma and eczema.
This research was also resisted by governments. Because of this resistance, the methodology which had consisted of participatory research using local health professionals and volunteers, was scrutinized by the local University Environmental Health Department. They found a potential bias in collection, since the citizens had tired of keeping records on responses. However, internal checks on the data showed that the data was most likely randomly collected since the randomly designated children had a normal sex ratio. There had been no mandate to assure this outcome.
Although the government did not accept the study, they acted to close the landfill.
OTHER RESEARCH:
The International Institute of Concern for Public Health has undertaken other research on the environmental influence on the health of children, which can be found in publications referenced below. The Wisconsin study of the death rate of low-birth-rate babies seems to indicate that separating infant mortality rate by birth weight category in routine vital statistics reporting would (unfortunately) be helpful in assessing air pollution. Since a baby’s death certificate does not ordinarily contain the birth weight, this would require a simple change of forms.
The research which the Institute undertook in the Marshall Islands, where residents tried to inhabit Islands which had heavy nuclear fallout after the atmospheric tests at Bikini, showed the same monocyte abnormalities noted at McClure Crescent and Canonsburg.
These residents were not in the initial fallout and did not live on the contaminated Island until after the US Government had declared them safe.
A major study of uranium contamination on the Mississauga Reserve in Northern Ontario is unpublished at the request of the Native Band involved in the study. However, requests for copies the study can be made to the Chief, only if the findings will assist other communities struggling with uranium pollution. The Mississauga Reserve is across the highway and down wind from a uranium processing plant. In this investigation, a grid over the reserve was used to determine the pattern of deposition of the uranium dust and isopleths were made to guide the People in locating their homes and vegetable gardens and in choosing areas for picking herbal medicines and sweet grass for their ceremonies.
Studies of the Mississauga Reserve residents for monocyte depletion and uranium in urine were undertaken and indicated residential contamination, which was internal, and especially affecting the children. In this case study the Band used several interventions including:
Moving the children’s daycare centre away from a contaminated area; Substituting distilled water for drinking and cooking purposes in homes for all children. Within three months on the distilled water, the monocytopenia on the Reserve disappeared. The children’s counts had averaged 270 per microlitre blood, and they were raised to an averaged 690 per microlitre of blood. This was more than a substitution for local water, since the main pathways for internal contamination on the Reserve were via air and local produce, not water. Distilled water is known to leach inorganic heavy metals from organic material. This increase is also too large an increase to be attributed solely to a placebo effect.
In another project which the Institute undertook in Bukit Merah, Malaysia, a community exposed to the Asian Rare Earth Co., a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi Company, the primary exposures of the community were to radon gas and thorium, both wastes of the chemical separating process. The 60 children, who were tested for total blood count and differential, had an average monocyte count of 207 per microlitre of blood. The expected average for children would be 325. The range of monocyte counts was 72 to 495, as against the normal 200 to 800 per microlitre of blood. One hundred seventy one (171) children in a neighboring village, Carey Island, were also tested. These children were exposed to a palm oil factory, and agricultural pesticides and herbicides, but not radioactive heavy metals. These children had a lower socioeconomic status than the study group, and their nutritional status was lower. However, their blood counts, and the monocyte count in particular, were normally distributed.
The IPOH High Court in Malaysia closed down the Asian Rare Earth factory for two years, for the cleanup and construction of a waste disposal building. The Bukit Merah children were tested three months after the factory-resumed operations (1987) and then again one year later (1988). The progressive deterioration was astonishing:
Characteristic 1987 1988
of Children tested
60 44
< 100 per microlitre 6 (10.0%) 13 (29.5%)
< 200 per microlitre 29 (43.9%) 25 (56.8%)
About 39% of the Bukit Merah children suffered from a triad of mild lymphadenopathy, congested turbinates and recurrent rhinitis. Less than 4% of the 171 Carey Island children presented with these symptoms. All children in the study had normal temperatures and were without obvious cold or sore throat symptoms. In a follow-up visit to Malaysia in 1989, it was found that two children, 5 and 7 years old, had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. A 19-year-old man, born in Bukit Merah and a life long inhabitant, was also diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Another 5-year-old child developed a malignant brain tumor. A two-year-old child died of septicemia, and a 22-year-old worker, from the A.R.E. factory, considered by his peers to be very healthy, died with a diagnosis of meningoencephalitis. On admission to the hospital, the workers blood count was reported as abnormally low in view of his overwhelming infection (6,600 per microlitre blood). According to the Malaysian statistics, the elevated leukemia rate alone in this population of 15,000, had a probability of 3 in 100,000 of happening by chance. The expected rate was 0.03 cases per year.
It is my hope that more such biomarkers of exposure will be developed, and more community health interventions will be discovered and undertaken at an early stage in the development of environmentally related disease. I hope also that further studies and confirmation of my work will be undertaken, and that new techniques to diagnose and treat communities at risk from pollution will be a major focus of future medical research.
CONCLUSIONS:
Environmental Health is becoming a new discipline in its own right, different from Occupational Health. I believe that Environmental Health efforts will more and more come to rely on biomarkers of exposure rather than gross biological end points; such a severe tissue damage or cancer deaths. The child with its sensitivity and rapid growth rate will become the most important indicator of community health, and will become the focus of major preventive health action.
Environmental health will need to focus on parameter shifts in the population rather than on the clinically abnormal few. For example, when an individuals’ normal monocyte count is about 400 per microlitre of blood, and due to bone incorporation of uranium it drops to 250 per microlitre of blood, he or she would have a bio-marker of exposure but not be clinically ill. The case is obviously clinically more important for the individual whose borderline monocyte count prior to the exposure, moves into moncytopenia. However, in terms of the health of the community, `community-shift’ is the focus and not the plight of the individual and, community intervention is the response. The entire community needs assistance, not only those who fall below clinical guidelines. The individual care can be relegated to the usual physician patient relationship. This means carefully distinguishing between a normally distributed community parameter with a few abnormal out-layers, and a clearly distinguishable bell curve moved from its normal mean value. It is also possible to have communities with bimodal characteristics, i.e. a subgroup has the bio-marker for exposure. This is a new field of health investigation, which requires new thinking and new tools.
In this paper four potential bio-markers have been noted: monocyte count, death rate of low birth weight infants, incidence rate of asthma, and incidence rate of eczema.
References:
“Environmental Influence on Survival of Low Birth Weight Infants in Wisconsin in 1963-1975” R. Bertell, N. Jacobson and M. Stogre. International Perspectives in Public Health Vol 1, issue 2 1984. #“Internal Bone Seeking Radio nuclides and Monocyte Counts” R. Bertell. International Perspectives in Public Health Vol. 9,1993. #_Health Profile of Area Children._ Prepared for Pickering-Ajax Citizens Together for the Environment by the IICPH, May 1995. #_Health 2000: Report to the Mississauga First Nation._ June 1993. Available through requests to Chief Douglas Daybutch, Mississauga First Nation, Band Office, Box 1299, Village Road, Blind River ON P0R 1B6 CANADA. #_A Report to the U. S. Congress on the Health Problems of the Rongelap People,_ June 1989. Available from the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, Resource Centre, 517 College St. Suite 326, Toronto ON MGG 4A2 CANADA. #_Clinical Haematology_ by Eastham, R.D., Bristol, 1986 #_Haematology_ edited by William S. Bede, MIT Press, 1986, p.p. 8-16.
— IICPH
http://iicph.org/children_health
Saturday, May 9, 2009
India: Breathing, Eating and Drinking Radiation in Jadugoda
Comment: this is a true Documentary, it has disburbing pictures, may be unsuitable to some people, like the young ones!
A documentary film called ’Jadugoda - The Black Magic’
by JOAR, 8 May 2009
This documentary uncovers the health effects of radiation exposure on the people who live in the viscinity to the uranium mining town of Jadugoda
This short documentary by Shriprakash is based on a study conducted by the Indian Doctors for Peace and Development (IDPD Patna chapter) in and around villages of Jadugoda uranium mine with help of JOAR (www.jadugoda.net). IDPD is Indian chapter of Germany / US based International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW - A Noble Peace prize winning organization).
http://www.sacw.net/article904.html
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