Cancer gave Utahn a healthy mistrust
So she is not an official downwinder. But that doesn't mean her thyroid cancer wasn't caused by nuclear fallout, says Dickson.
Now 45 and director of creative services for KUED-TV, Dickson was diagnosed with cancer when she was 29. Thyroid cancer has a excellent cure-rate and Dickson is now healthy. But the experience has left her wary of official rhetoric that downplays the effects and reach of nuclear testing.
And her distrust doesn't stop there, she says.
"Here we come to the other end of the Cold War and people want to store spent nuclear fuel rods (in Utah's western desert). It amazes me that Utahns aren't more outraged."
Dickson's story highlights the pitfalls and frustrations of trying to track down the cause of any particular cancer. How do you know when to chalk an illness up to bad luck or the environment? How do you separate exposure to fallout from exposure to another carcinogen.
Although her claims would have been dismissed as a leap of logic just a few years ago, a 1997 report released by the National Cancer Institute found that much of the nation was blanketed with fallout from the 141 atmospheric tests performed at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 through 1962.
"Downwinders All" is the title of Dickson's essay that appears in "Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader," published this year by the University of Arizona Press. "There wasn't a magic shield in Richfield that kept fallout from going anywhere else," says Dickson. "People need to know that what happens in other people's back yard also happens to them."
Although some people were exposed to radiation by direct exposure — the atomic dust actually landed on their bodies and wafted through their windows — there was also another, more insidious route: air-to-grass-to-milk. The isotope Iodine-131 (just one of several radionuclides in fallout) lands on grass, is eaten by cows, collects in milk and is deposited in human thyroid glands. Because children have a higher metabolism and generally drink more milk, they are most affected by I-131. Those who drank milk from back-yard cows and back-yard goats in the 1950s, got the highest doses, but commercial milk was also a culprit.
You can be the first to comment on this story.