Cancer gave Utahn a healthy mistrust

She has no heartbreaking story about being bundled into the family Chevy to watch bombs explode across the desert sky. When the government was conducting nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the mid-1950s — showering atomic dust on unsuspecting southern Utahns — Mary Dickson was living 300 miles comfortably to the north, taking her first baby steps at her parents home in Salt Lake County.

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.

"There's no way I can prove how I got it," says Dickson about her thyroid cancer. "But there's no way they can prove that's not how I got it either."

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."