US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis 1945-1970 (2011)

https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/13170

by Jimmc414 • 2 years ago

158 122 2 years ago

mospace.umsystem.edu

Jimmc4142• 2 years ago

Server appears to be getting hugged to death. Here is the archive link.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.u...

rightbyte• 2 years ago

When I am bitter about the state of academia I remind my self that research in medicine especially on mental patients used to be horrendous.

These mocked ethics commitees are there for a good reason.

observationist• 2 years ago

That doesn't mean they shouldn't be reined in or criticized when they take themselves too seriously or go too far. Bureaucracies need regular pruning or they take over.

A_D_E_P_T3• 2 years ago

Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians.

By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2]

1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/

2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/

bguebert• 2 years ago

It reminds me of this story about a guy that was injected with plutonium without his consent. They thought he wouldn't mind since he had a terminal cancer diagnosis (that later turned out to be mistaken). It doesn't make sense why they would do this kind of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

zero-sharp• 2 years ago

There's a guy on youtube who makes videos about these sorts of things:

https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos

(radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)

greenavocado• 2 years ago

It was not just one person that was injected with plutonium. https://lib-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00326640.pdf

surfingdino• 2 years ago

Governments are happy to experiment and exploit their own citizens "for science" or for money. Western drug makers were buying cerebrospinal fluid from Eastern Europe in 1970s and the governments were allowing this to happen because they were getting paid in US dollars. In small towns every kid had a lubmar puncture whether they needed it or not as soon as they went to the local hospital for whatever reason.

hobobaggins• 2 years ago

Wow, and it was actually heart disease that took him and not the radiation directly.

This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy)

https://tubitv.com/movies/100001428/joe-versus-the-volcano

krisoft2• 2 years ago

I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process.

And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.

jorvi• 2 years ago

And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s.

To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Modern polite correct cancel culture snowflakes discover science. This is hilarious.

Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.

oooyay5• 2 years ago

Radon mainly effects the lungs and requires continued exposure. I still personally would not expect a radon rich spring to be healthy, even with short term exposure. The effects of radon exposure over time on the lungs are well studied. Anecdotally, the primitive way to determine radon presence in a home without the use of sensors is to look at the number of scratches on a window. Radon causes them.

mpreda• 2 years ago

What kind of window scratches? on the inside or the outside of the window? visible to the eye?

nsguy• 2 years ago

Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We did. No Radon...

AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going around about how a small amount of radiation can be beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.

Loughla• 2 years ago

I cannot find anything about window scratches and radon. Do you have a source for that? My googling is failing me.

odyssey722• 2 years ago

Good news: you might not need to add a radon tank to the hot tub you already own. The control group for [2] was people who did not do any hot spring bathing at all during an average week, so their methodology does not explore the significance of the radon itself.

A_D_E_P_T3• 2 years ago

The interesting thing is that they didn't find a higher incidence of lung, esophageal, and other soft-tissue cancers in elderly folks who bath in radon springs more than once a week.

The blood pressure reduction probably has more to do with heat exposure than with radon itself. Seems to me that regular exposure to a normal sauna or hot spring would probably elicit similar results.

nazgulsenpai• 2 years ago

I am reminded of this somewhat unrelated but interesting bit of history involving glow-in-the-dark paint in the 1920s. I got radium and radon crossed in my brain before looking up this article, but figured it's interesting enough to share anyway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

drewcoo2• 2 years ago

Sure, but this is the US and they hadn't tried it on a contained black population yet . . .

bilbo0s2• 2 years ago

The worst part about this comment is that I can't dispute the fact that the government tends to experiment on these populations. Sometimes, humans just suck and there's nothing you can do about it.

About the only rebuttal I can give is that it's not just the US. I'm sure every nation has some population that they treat like dirt.

Whatabout-ism? Yes, but that's pretty much all I got.

userbinator• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis is a thing.

Retric2• 2 years ago

It might be a thing, though there’s zero direct evidence that it’s true.

Worse there’s an interest group that desires to push such a narrative anyway.

zdragnar• 2 years ago

No need to go all the way to Japan, just head to the radon health mines in Montana.

https://radonmine.com/

I first heard of it because we were visiting some Amish families and one wasn't around because they were on a trip out there.

odyssey722• 2 years ago

"Through this case study, the author explores how a large number of participants inside an organization will willingly participate in organizational acts that are harmful to others, and how large numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or harmful activity by an organization."

Truly unsettling. Everyday Americans secretly exploited by their own government. If this were punishment for a crime, it would be unconstitutional due to being cruel, inhumane, and without due process. But it wasn't punishment for anything, the government just attacked them.

odyssey722• 2 years ago

From the timeline on page 253:

1944 - Army Medical Corps authorize Rochester to study polonium exposure on humans (Moss, et al, 196)

April 10, 1945 - The first human plutonium injection occurs in Oak Ridge; three others were “approved” for Chicago, Berkeley/San Francisco, and Los Alamos by Dr. Friedell at Oak Ridge (under Langham‟s instruction), Hamilton, and Warren. (Moss, et al, 195)

April 26, 1945 - Second human plutonium injection takes place in a 68-year old man at Billings Hospital in Chicago (Moss, et al, 197).

May 14, 1945 - Third person injected with plutonium at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco (Moss, et al, 197).

October 1945-July 1946 - Eleven patients were injected with plutonium at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY; this included seven men and four women ranging in age from 18 years through 68 years old. The 18-year old died approximately 1.5 years later (Moss, et al, 205).

hajile• 2 years ago

Don't forget 751 pregnant women given radioactive vitamins. They claim only 3 kids died, but destroyed a bunch of documentation in the 70s, so the actual conclusions were probably far more damning.

webdoodle• 2 years ago

Sounds a lot like a certain pandemic, and haphazard vaccine program that was mandated afterwards.

yard2010• 2 years ago

I would argue there goes a long way between these incidents and what you imply

tomwheeler• 2 years ago

St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It remains a problem to this day.

Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers claim it's no big deal.

tylerflick• 2 years ago

All of this is still probably less toxic than the water in the Lake of the Ozarks (partially kidding).

fransje262• 2 years ago

What's the problem with water in the Lake of the Ozarks?

dole• 2 years ago

I worked from 2008-2016 next to that landfill [0] and for the last three years of that, being outdoors meant constantly smelling the worst sour milk smell you've ever smelled everyday and stinging your eyes at least once a week.

Coldwater Creek [1] is a whole other catastrophe with independent investigators and like you said, denial from the gov't entities. "In August 2015, the United States Army Corps of Engineers admitted that they found thorium-230 in the creek. In January 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated the high rate of cancers in the area, and confirmed a potential link between the cluster and the polluted creek. In 2022, radioactive material was found at Jana Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District in Florissant. The radioactive material includes lead-210, polonium, radium, and other toxic materials." The Army Corps of Engineers has been cleaning up the creek for decades but refuses to share detailed information with the public about its findings."

"... Most startling, however, was that the documents indicated that the USACE, dating back to 2016, had notified Hazelwood School Board members that it wanted to enter school grounds to conduct testing. ... Bernaugh and the Jana Elementary PTA sent a letter to parents informing them of their discoveries. On August 5, the Hazelwood School District, in a separate letter, acknowledged that the USACE had informed it of “low-level radioactive contamination” on the property on January 27, 2022. For over six months, it had failed to inform the community of these results, maintaining that the “contamination did not pose an immediate risk.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coldwater_Creek_(Missouri_rive...

[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/jana-elementar...

wumeow4• 2 years ago

TLDR: they wanted to study how aerosols disperse in cities and they underestimated or ignored the risks of the tracer they used.

odyssey722• 2 years ago

The aerosols being dispersed were biological and chemical weapons. If the responsible government officials underestimated the risks, it was because they had no evidence that it would be harmless to spray their experimental biological and chemical weapons on schoolchildren.

Page 30:

"Army officials lied to city leaders and residents, saying the tests were intended to see if smoke screens could protect the city from Russian bomber attacks. But recently released Army reports admit that was a "cover story" for... secret biological and chemical warfare tests (Sawyer, 1994)."

wumeow4• 2 years ago

No, the aerosol was zinc cadmium sulfide. It wasn’t testing of biological and chemical weapons, it was testing of a simulant to model how those weapons would disperse through a city.

aaomidi4• 2 years ago

“Why don’t people trust the government with vaccines???”

Meanwhile. The government.

aaomidi4• 2 years ago

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray

popcalc• 2 years ago

I like to think this influenced the counter-culture movement of the 60's.

kube-system10• 2 years ago

-- Sent via DARPA Internet Protocol

The US government does so many damn things that it can be used as an example of just about anything.

aaomidi4• 2 years ago

The internet was going to happen with or without US government involvement. The US government just made it faster.

Also, comparing testing radiation vs testing fast communications is not a valid equivalency.

odyssey722• 2 years ago

Red herring. Abusing your citizens is bad. If the government wants to be trusted it should make itself trustworthy.

rufus_foreman• 2 years ago

It's hilarious that this gets voted down. The whole thread is "government bad, not to be trusted".

Someone replies, "government bad, not to be trusted?".

Immediate downvotes.

History didn't suddenly stop yesterday, kids.

fundad2• 2 years ago

We trust scientists working at private companies to develop vaccines and we trust the private US healthcare providers to administer them and we get to live long.

fundad2• 2 years ago

How long do you want vaccine development to take?

drewcoo2• 2 years ago

Unless, I'm mistaken, this was at Pruitt-Igoe, the first US housing project, torn down in the 70s. The testing was long thought to be some kind of "conspiracy theory," which is a wonderful way to dismiss any claims of official abuse.

The first link DDG gave me:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-s...

no_exit• 2 years ago

https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...

suby• 2 years ago

A government study found that in a worst-case scenario, “repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity and lung cancer.” Yet the Army contends there is no evidence anyone in St. Louis was harmed.
A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement to the AP that health assessments performed by the Army “concluded that exposure would not pose a health risk,” and follow-up independent studies also found no cause for alarm.

This whole thing is outrageous.

chrsmth• 2 years ago

This reminds me of another story. Apparently zinc cadmium sulfide was dropped on Canadians by the US military in 1953 -- 2 Albertan towns, and Winnipeg. The timing was so close it made me wonder if it was part of the same program. It seems so, Winnipeg is mentioned in the full research paper.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-secretly-tested-car...

ricksunny4• 2 years ago

Very interested in this (the metastatic effects of secrecy in sensitivd projects that lack what you might call a 'secrecy-self-kill-switch' built-in from conception), thank you for posting.

ricksunny4• 2 years ago

Curious whether surfacing it was precipitated by this exchange in House-DoE hearing yesterday? (timestamped): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx5pLoDXIg&t=4032s

odyssey722• 2 years ago

Maybe. They conspicuously refer to the radiation in what sounds like official language. Expanding the compensation for the harms of WWII-era toxic waste to people in St. Louis, rather than to include the people in St. Louis who were experimented on during the Cold War.

Wild that right after this topic, Burchett pivots the discussion to UFOs and aliens and the US Secretary of Energy asserts that they aren’t real. I guess it could be read as a dismissive suggestion to those interested that the St. Louis experiments are just another conspiracy theory.

jongjong• 2 years ago

That has to be the most disturbing abstract I've ever read.

Clearly, that is proof that the government has conspired to harm its own citizens in the past.

This precedent makes it clear that those who opposed COVID19 vaccines were not 'crazy conspiracy theorists' as the media led everyone to believe but were in fact potentially very reasonable people. Every person who called anti-vaxers 'crazy' essentially engaged in gaslighting. Firing unvaccinated employees was an act of pure malevolence.

Do you think you would trust a vaccine from the government if that same government had sprayed your grandparents with radioactive materials? Yet that's exactly what was being asked of some people during COVID19 pandemic.

It's disturbing how few people can understand the evil behind vaccine mandates. Variants of the story above were literally what many people faced. Many people can clearly remember instances of government abuse directed against their family members. You cannot expect, much less force such people to trust the government.

If you suspect that you may have become a member of the underclass, you are right to assume that you may become a target of the government and you have the right to protect yourself.

It sounds insane to say it like that, but this is the reality that the government has created. It has made it rational to be paranoid.

The government has many tentacles and each tentacle doesn't necessarily know what the other tentacles are doing. It's foolish to assume that the government can always be trusted. It can never be fully trusted. The government shouldn't even trust itself. It should be designed with that in mind.

NULLKoIG• 2 years ago

"But not all Ikariots enjoy the same degree of longevity. Data from the ongoing study shows that people living in the northern part of the island outlive those inhabiting the southern part, and therein lies the mystery. Presumably southern Ikariots have no significant dietary differences from their northern counterparts—nor would genetics make sense, since there’s little chance of finding genetically isolated populations on a small island. That’s why some experts have proposed one possible reason for this discordant longevity—geology"

The north and northwest of the island are predominated by granite rocks, which naturally contain trace amounts of uranium and are known to emit very low doses of gamma radiation, between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually—somewhere in between the amount of radiation you would absorb from a single chest X-ray and a more-powerful CT scan.

“To the south of the island, on the contrary, limestone predominates,” says Christodoulos Stefanadis, professor of cardiology at the National University of Athens and the Ikaria study’s head researcher. Statistically, people in the north of the island live significantly longer than those to the south. In 2001, the northern part of the island had 11 male and 22 female nonagenarians and centenarians out of a total of 1,452 male and 1,359 female inhabitants—whereas only five out of 1,691 men and 19 out of 1,710 women were over 90 in the southern part.

Stefanadis says this appears to be tied to the excess in gamma rays in the north, which are between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually (over and above a universally “normal” amount of gamma rays would be about 1 to 2 millisievert per year). “This radiation difference is an independent prognostic factor of longevity,” Stefanadis says, though he is quick to add there is not enough evidence to confirm this definitively, simply because the question has not been properly investigated.

https://proto.life/2021/11/ikaria-the-island-of-mysterious-l...

odyssey722• 2 years ago

Would you endorse secretly spiking a stranger’s drink with uranium?

To make this scenario more comparable, you would need to randomize the amount of uranium because you would need to be unsure of the effect of the dose. You would also need to do this to schoolchildren.

You would also need to be the US Army or acting under the authority of the US Army.

You would also need to be immune to prosecution and to any legal remedy sought by the survivors.

US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis 1945-1970 (2011)

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