Have DU — Will Travel: Interview with Dr. Ernest Sternglass
‘What we’ve done is to replace the fallout from bomb testing with the so-called small permitted releases from nuclear plants.’
ICONOCLAST: I thought maybe you would be willing to discuss depleted uranium and its health implications.
STERNGLASS: I’ve been examining all the latest findings that have been reported and the evidence is just simply overwhelming that the DU particles travel around the world and they are far more toxic than anyone had suspected for uranium.
ICONOCLAST: Do you think the study is legitimate?
STERNGLASS: The latest thing that has happened in this field is that Dr. Chris Busby together with another person prepared a paper that is called ‘Did The Use of Uranium Weapons in the Gulf War 2 Result in the Contamination of Europe?’ and he shows the evidence from the measurements of the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Britain and it’s just overwhelming. What he finds is just remarkable. It turns out that the British people who develop atomic weapons have been monitoring activity in the air for years and under freedom of information he was able to get hold of the data they had stopped publishing years ago in 1999. They kept measuring it and essentially this is what they found. Compared to a period of a few years during which these measurements were averaged the article says that typically the levels were the order of 100 units. Then during the three weeks between the Gulf War events that took place on March 19, the first strike of our airplanes against Bagdad, then on March 20, the second round of air strikes took place, the 21st of March, heavy aerial attacks on many cities, on April 14, the major fighting was declared over. So he looked at these three weeks and the number of stations that measured radioactivity in Britain, and he found that instead of 100 units average in the background use in the same place suddenly it rose to 600 during those three weeks. They tested it in every possible way. They even looked at the details of the geographic and the meteorological data and he published the charts for the Atlantic and Europe and the meteorological office, and, low and behold, there is no other way, and in fact they could show that air from Africa in that direction moved all the way to Europe and deposited some sand from the Sahara, so there was simply no alternative to the use of battlefield uranium. It has been clearly shown to allow these fine particles that have less than a quarter of a million diameter. They measured it and calculated in three weeks how many of these particles would be taken in by a person breathing normally and spending some time outdoors and they calculated that 23 million tiny particles of a quarter million diameter in the concentration that they measure would reach the body and go to the lungs and enter the lymphatic system and produce all kinds of organ damage.
ICONOCLAST: What does that mean to the average citizen of Great Britain? That they have a better chance of getting cancer?
STERNGLASS: Not only cancer. I have been particularly studying the recent rise of diabetes that has taken place around the world. I’ve looked at the 50 states in the United States for which the CDC has just recently published the detailed data by age group, 18-44, 45-64, 65- 74, 75+, plus the total for the whole number, and the age adjusted rates for every state between 1994 and 2004. The overwhelming evidence is that, for instance, in Alaska there was a huge rise, especially sensitive in the 75+ age Ernest Sternglass, Ph.D., is Director, and Chief Technical Officer of the RPHP Baby Teeth Study. In 1963, Dr. Sternglass was invited to testify before the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as to how the exponential increase in strontium-90 in baby teeth caused by bomb-test fallout was associated with increased childhood leukemia. His research and testimony played a role in President Kennedy’s decision to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty. As Professor Emeritus of Radiological Physics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, Dr. Sternglass has written numerous articles on the health effects of low-level radiation. His 1981 book Secret Fallout: Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island established him as a pioneer in the study of the health effects of low-level radiation. Continued On Next Page Sternglass group, which went from a low of 5.8% of the population that age in 1997 to as high as 13.7% by the year 2003. There was a peak in between of 15.1 in 2002 and there are no nuclear plants anywhere near Alaska. A very comparable rise of the same order of percentage rise especially for the total age adjusted rate occurred in Japan. Evidence has been published in China about Japan and China recently that Japan has almost twice the rate of diabetes that we have in our nation. Typically, the greatest rises in our case have initially taken place in areas near large nuclear facilities like in Tennessee and downwind to the northeast in Kentucky and West Virginia. In fact, the areas in the west which are relatively far from the oceans on both sides, like Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, those states had relatively low rates of diabetes in the early years of 1994. But then they rose and essentially achieved pretty much the same levels as the states with large nuclear facilities.
ICONOCLAST: How does radiation cause diabetes?
STERNGLASS: There was an article in January 2005 in SCIENCE, in which they found that what was going on, and this is really amazing, is that they find that obesity is also rising and no one knows quite why. They find that there are genetic factors, mutations, damage to the pancreas and to the islands of beta cells that produce insulin that normally produce adequate amounts of insulin. In the case of Type 1, they stop producing insulin all together and in the case of Type 2, they often don’t supply enough. Genes that control the production of certain hormones are damaged and all of this is explained. These biological mechanisms are now becoming clear, but nobody knows what is triggering the whole chain and that’s exactly what is now available in the article that appeared in SCIENCE, Volume 311 on Feb. 3, 2006, page 622-628. It’s an article called ‘The Toxic Potential of Materials at the Nano Level.’ It explains in detail how any kind of material, it could be ordinary carbon or a metal that is not radioactive, if these particles are small enough, that is tinier than a micron, which is a millionth of a meter, or one ten thousandths of a centimeter, if these particles are that small, it turns out they are toxic in themselves, whatever they are composed of. That’s exactly what’s happening in the case of nanoparticles which are produced when the uranium burns upon impact and melts steel and the fine particles are so small, they act like a gas. So what you’re getting is a gas of uranium that gets transported around the world and is now proven by these latest measurements. And so what we’re seeing is an epidemic of all types of conditions that we did not understand, that have been in continuous rise in this country in the last 15 years, actually since the mid-80s. A very consistent rise, especially in cancers that are known to be produced by radioactive materials. The most well-known of these is thyroid cancer, and the incidence of thyroid cancer has the most new cases, not mortality, because most people do not die of thyroid cancer because it can be treated, but the incidence of thyroid damage in general and in particular thyroid cancer has been going up steadily and this is again due to radioactive products. We know that this is true now that other cancers, especially pancreatic and breast cancer, have been rising. The incidence of mortality has leveled off in breast cancer and has come down slightly, that is the total number of people who die of breast cancer has been declining slightly because of the great improvement of medical techniques of early detection, early treatment, and successful treatment by chemicals and surgical techniques that have been developed. We have had no real understanding of why diabetes has been rising so enormously and now it all comes together. It’s all happening at this very moment, in fact. I’m in the process of writing a paper that I will be presenting in Japan in the middle of March. I’m leaving for Japan on March 8 and it’s just mind-blowing to what degree measurements by the Weapons Establishment in England show that these fine particles travel thousands of miles around the world and, in fact, Leuren Moret has pictures that NASA satellites took showing the sand storms going across the Atlantic and all over the world so we have totally underestimated the very serious nature of the use of uranium as weapons.
ICONOCLAST: I know that the government in Texas, for instance, have been promoting better diets for students. They say junk food is the cause of obesity.
STERNGLASS: It’s the combination of all these factors. This is what happens a series of articles in recent years have shown that one key reason diabetes is produced is that in the centers in the brain that control appetite and that receive signals from fatty tissue, hormones are sent out, when either the brain center is damaged or the production of chemicals that signal that enough fat is accumulated so that there is no need to eat more, when this is damaged then people simply cannot stop eating and this happens particularly strongly in the case of young people who live in areas where there’s a lot of milk that was shipped into inner cities from somewhere with nuclear reactors nearby. It happens in Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York City, all of which we see milk from around the area, Three Mile Island, Peachbottom, and the Virginia reactors and the ones in New Jersey because the states, and we published a book that describes this in detail in 1990 called “Deadly Deceit,” in which my associates Dr. Jay Gould, who just recently passed away and Ben Goldman, interviewed House officials in different states, especially D.C., and the states around this area and they said yes, we mix the milk from these areas because there is a law that was passed way back during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s to protect farmers whose milk just doesn’t taste quite good and it allows the federal government to help them by buying the milk and making sure that the farmer receives the full price and then they mix it with other milk and ship it to other areas where it is consumed.
ICONOCLAST: So you’re saying that milk is contaminated with DU?
STERNGLASS: Often is it not only contaminated with DU, but with the permitted releases of nuclear plants, which you know they typically emit such elements as cesium 137 and strontium 190, as well as fine particles of uranium and plutonium, and these products and other heavy elements that are produced in the reaction in the reactor. These are tiny particles that enter the environment, get into the milk, into the grass, a cow concentrates some of them like radioactive iodine and radioactive strontium, especially. The theory was that by diluting it there would be too small a concentration to see, but, unfortunately, the dose response curve over the last 20-30 years, it has been discovered, is not a straight line. In fact, the greatest effect rises for tiny doses. It rises rapidly for the first 50 hundred milligrams and then flattens out, and this is called the logorhythmic dose response. This diluted milk, or milk that has quite a bit of radioactivity in it, was extrapolated and was believed would be too small to make a significant detectable difference. But it turns out, in fact, to be very sensitive and, therefore, we find that in Washington D.C. which has no cows of its own, it developed during the recent years of nuclear reactors since the 1970s essentially, when the large reactors began operating D.C. began to have the highest infant mortality in the nation, together with the highest number of children born below normal weight. And this is moreso than in areas that have a very large concentration of black people like Mississippi, Louisiana, many of the states in the South. And so the overwhelming evidence that is coming together is that it is a combination of many things that we did not fully understand. We did not understand that the dose response is not a straight line, but rises very rapidly for the tiny doses and curves down and becomes flat. That’s why not everybody in Europe died from the huge releases in Cherynobyl. We saw children and infant mortality peak in the summer of 1986 from Cherynobyl. We published papers on this. We found that wherever there were high levels measured by the EPA by radioactive iodine, and radioactive strontium that came from Cherynobyl in certain parts of the country, in those areas, there was an increase in total mortality over the previous years, and also mortality and infectious diseases and infant mortality. That could not have been explained except for the existence of this superlinear dose response, which again, is something that we had never seen. With the number of ordinary x-rays, for instance, there was a straight line relationship between the number of x-rays given and the incidence of childhood cancer, when mothers received x-rays during pregnancy. That is a paper I published in 1963. At that time, I was unaware of the evidence that the children who die of cancer as a result of the x-rays are not representative of what happens when you have internal doses from substances that keep giving you radiation over days, weeks, months, and years, especially since strontium 90 deposits in the bone and stays there for many years in children and even longer in adults. Typically in children two to three years, there’s a half life, biologically in children, and about five to ten years in adults. We simply underestimated enormously, by factors of hundreds to thousands of times, what tiny doses of internally deposited materials do as compared to what we experienced in over a hundred years of experience with medical x-rays.
ICONOCLAST: What do you think needs to happen to correct matters?
STERNGLASS: Number one, we absolutely have to convert our nuclear plants to natural gas, which we’ve done in Colorado and Colorado now has a relatively low rate of cancer and infant mortality, compared to other states. That can be done and has been done in other countries too. Sweden and many of the other European nations: Italy has now shut down its nuclear plants, Austria shut down its nuclear plants and the Germany is committed to converting to eliminating nuclear plants and replacing it with wind or solar power and geothermal power. We’re the only nation in the world that has spent the least amount of money on alternative methods of generating energy. We’ve invested so much in uranium in the ground, all the major investment firms urged and invested enormously in uranium. And we have enormous investments in oil and gas, of course. Many people want to continue to burn coal. It can be burned in a cleaner way, but all this has been done much more in Europe where people felt no guilt about having developed the bomb and tested it in the first place.
ICONOCLAST: Is it more dangerous having nuclear power plants or having DU ammunitions.
STERNGLASS: I would say that you cannot make a comparison. If you live downwind from a nuclear plant, and you can look at our website, radiation.org, you’ll see a series of articles and some of them are directly available, including my book, “Secret Fallout,” is available on the internet through the website for free. You will see that there was a decline in infant mortality all the way since 1935 in the country and that leveled off when we began nuclear bomb testing in Nevada in the 1950s and actually rose for the first time in 1958. Recently, in 2002, after declining a little bit after the end of nuclear testing in ’63, it did not go back to the baseline as expected. Infant mortality, in a sense, is twice as many babies are dying in this country in the first year of life as should be if the initial trend had continued. What we’ve done is to replace the fallout from bomb testing with the so called small permitted releases from nuclear plants. We’ve confirmed this, as described in our website article listed there. There are 21 articles and letters to medical journals and international referee journals that explain all this and that warned about it but the industry and our present government and Washington wants to continue the construction of new nuclear plants and even consider new nuclear weapons to replace old ones and to build bunker busters that would supposedly penetrate deeply into underground storage of chemical weapons and so on. Russia, China, and England are also reluctant to end this, but it is now happening in many countries in the world that they are going to other alternative means of generating electricity. And finding other fuels and oils, such as biomass, of which I just recently attended a conference in Austria, and many of these countries are doing things that we should be doing. Right now, for instance, Denmark is producing more than 20 percent of the energy by wind power alone. Sweden has decided that in another 15 to 20 years, it will replace all its coal and nuclear plants with alternative means of generating electricity.
ICONOCLAST: Any other comments?
STERNGLASS: I would say that we have to end the use of ammunition that contains uranium in any form. We have to understand that we made a tragic mistake in vastly underestimating the doses from internal emittors that we inhale with our air and ingest with our food and milk and our drinkng water. It is simply going to destroy the economy of this nation, as well as its health, and as I’ve published in papers, it affects the brain. It has led to a decline in SAT scores all through the period, typically 18 years after major nuclear test in Nevada. There was a decline in SAT scores that could not be explained. I predicted in the article that when the testing would end, 18 years later, the SAT score would begin to recover. That’s exactly what happened. It never recovered its early level because we replaced the fallout from the bomb test with radiactive, permitted releases that we thought and felt, as I did when I was a young scientist and engineer and the research laboratory in Westinghouse here in Pittsburgh, when I believed it was a wonderful development to replace the dirty coal plants with clean nuclear reactors too cheap to meter. We had no idea as to the enormous great seriousness of the low level of continued doses from the tiny amounts that we thought were so inocuous, based on all the years of our studies of x-rays.
Ernest Sternglass, Ph.D., is Director, and Chief Technical Officer of the RPHP Baby Teeth Study. In 1963, Dr. Sternglass was invited to testify before the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as to how the exponential increase in strontium-90 in baby teeth caused by bomb-test fallout was associated with increased childhood leukemia. His research and testimony played a role in President Kennedy’s decision to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty. As Professor Emeritus of Radiological Physics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, Dr. Sternglass has written numerous articles on the health effects of low-level radiation. His 1981 book Secret Fallout: Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island established him as a pioneer in the study of the health effects of low-level radiation.
