'Bizarre' Cluster of Severe Birth Defects Stuns Health Experts, Rural Washington Area

reply to post by stirling


Thanks for the tip.

A link to their site:

Physicians for Social Responsibility: Hanford Nuclear Reservation
Chapter links are in the lefthand menu.

There's no shortage of those blaming or linking the Yakima birth defects to Hanford;

“Worrisome” spike in deadly birth defects around leaking U.S. nuclear site — Officials claim “it could be a complete coincidence” — No news reports mention it’s by the most contaminated area in Western Hemisphere #Hanford

Birth defects rise near Hanford radioactive site “just a coincidence”

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


What's associated with Glyphosate (aka Round Up) is cardiovascular abnormality and not neural tube defects. Tetragens tend to affect specific areas of development. If neural tube defects were associated with it, it'd be "out there" (one would hope lol). Likewise, if it were only private well drinking women that were affected, you'd think that the articles would mention that correlation. Instead, just "reminders" to be careful about drinking well water without overt mention of well water use.

The NIH abstract basically denies impact of Hanford employment or emissions, which I find rather interesting. Based on my grandfather's experiences as an atomic veteran, I'm not surprised when I see waffling or shrugged shoulders. There's a pretty long history of it when it comes to radiation exposures. The alternative would probably result in a string of nasty lawsuits so maybe I can't blame them.

DU rounds are not used at Yakima Firing Center (YTC - Yakima Training Center). I know, I was an instructor there from 2006-2009 when I retired. It's used the grand majority of the time by light infantry and motorized convoy security type units getting trained up to deploy. There is just a lot of soft targets and non-targets to fire at there, so to waste DU rounds on that is not what units do. Hell, we don't even like using tracers there because they set off huge wildfires.

Of interest on YTC is a NSA listening post with a few huge dishes that goes 7 stories deep that covers all Pacific rim comms like phones, internet, etc.

The likely reason is the place is super windy and dusty and is surrounded by fields of hops and other crops, so probably pesticides. Industrial waste and filth is a prime birth defect cause. When I was in Iraq, there were all these deformed kids and young adults, midgets and people with other conditions. This was north, so not in Desert Storm areas and it wasn't iraqi freedom that caused it because I was there in 2003 at the very beginning. The cause was the place was a wreck. Open sewage running in the streets with barefoot kids playing soccer in it, oil and smoke from the oil everywhere, selling gas in open buckets next to live chickens at markets and chunks of sewage and contaminates in the big blocks of ice everyone bought to cool their food.

gymbeau2000
DU rounds are not used at Yakima Firing Center (YTC - Yakima Training Center). I know, I was an instructor there from 2006-2009 when I retired. It's used the grand majority of the time by light infantry and motorized convoy security type units getting trained up to deploy. There is just a lot of soft targets and non-targets to fire at there, so to waste DU rounds on that is not what units do. Hell, we don't even like using tracers there because they set off huge wildfires.

Of interest on YTC is a NSA listening post with a few huge dishes that goes 7 stories deep that covers all Pacific rim comms like phones, internet, etc.

The likely reason is the place is super windy and dusty and is surrounded by fields of hops and other crops, so probably pesticides. Industrial waste and filth is a prime birth defect cause. When I was in Iraq, there were all these deformed kids and young adults, midgets and people with other conditions. This was north, so not in Desert Storm areas and it wasn't iraqi freedom that caused it because I was there in 2003 at the very beginning. The cause was the place was a wreck. Open sewage running in the streets with barefoot kids playing soccer in it, oil and smoke from the oil everywhere, selling gas in open buckets next to live chickens at markets and chunks of sewage and contaminates in the big blocks of ice everyone bought to cool their food.

Not to mention open pit burning of just about every man made object imaginable. Plus water that is contaminated with tons of heavy metals and chemicals due to the oil drilling and refining. I was in Saudi back in 95, and yeah...the middle east is one giant NBC nightmare.

Hanford has been a problem some time. I have a buddy who lives in Pasco (right down center of Hanford). He said he tried breeding his female border collie a few times, but she'd either lose the pregnancy or give birth to deformed puppies. so who knows.

They did use DP rounds for a number of years at Yakima, there was a suit about collecting samples of the dust and checking the levels of DP. Dunno when they stopped.

loveguy
reply to post by Blackmarketeer

 

Of course it could be a combination of the two. Sadly, these cases are being met with active denial by investigators, who appear to refuse to make any connections to the firing range or nuclear dump site.

Ofcourse they won't admit anything they are liable for...

But, they aren't liable:

Price Anderson is the 1957 law which allows the commercial nuclear industry to operate with a cap on their liability for a catastrophic accident. (see Nuclear Monitor, December 2001) The effect of this cap is twofold: obviously it saves the nuclear industry money in case of an accident which would cost more than about 10 billion dollars.

Additionally, this cap guarantees a limit for which insurers will be responsible. Without a guarantee capping accident costs at a certain amount, insurance companies would never offer to insure nuclear reactors-it's that simple. Without Price Anderson, nuclear power would have to purchase insurance entirely with its own resources, if it could even find a willing insurer, which is doubtful.

The above quote is from the 'background' section of: www.nirs.org...

As for studies, our elected officals (a majority of them anyway) have cut spending so much there is no money to pay public servants for doing work on the public behalf. Only overpriced, incompetant and 'industry tools' get paid now - the wonders of privatization.

No this shouldn't happen, it should not go un-researched and un-remedied - but it does thanks to 'small government',tricle-down theives. All hail the saint ronnie.

gymbeau2000

Of interest on YTC is a NSA listening post with a few huge dishes that goes 7 stories deep that covers all Pacific rim comms like phones, internet, etc.

That is of interest.

FyreByrd

gymbeau2000

Of interest on YTC is a NSA listening post with a few huge dishes that goes 7 stories deep that covers all Pacific rim comms like phones, internet, etc.

That is of interest.

edit on 17-2-2014 by FyreByrd because: (no reason given)

Indeed. I had never even heard of it before now.........

reply to post by FyreByrd


Of interest in it's own right, but surely not the cause of the birth defects.

I would guess when you have a contaminated superfund site that will likely never be cleaned up nearby an army firing range you have a lot of surrounding area the federal government can snap up for other uses. A perfect place to put some installation you want to keep out of the public eye yet close to a large city.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


I take it there's No Fracking close to the district/s mentioned ??

steaming
reply to post by Blackmarketeer

 

I take it there's No Fracking close to the district/s mentioned ??

I don't think there is any in Washington State at all.

reply to post by FyreByrd


That doesn't apply to downwinders and others exposed through incidental or onsite involvement. People living in the region in question could be recipients of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act

What they are doing is compensation workers exposed in the region in question. Hanford "downwinders" have been fighting legal battles for years on the subject. They were offered a settlement in 2012 that was about $6100 per plaintiff. So yes, one can sue but the government will bog it down in the courts for ages until they make a low settlement offer...
www.spokesman.com...

However, RECA has been compensating in the "ok, we'll pay up" approved exposures. My grandmother in law was a RECA recipient for having breast cancer as a Nevada Proving Ground downwinder. My grandfather received RECA compensation for exposures in the Pacific, Nevada, and etc (atomic veteran) due to 4 difference cancers and radiation hematuria. Ergo, RECA covers both atomic veterans, workers and downwinder civilians (but only from Nevada exposure).

At this time, RECA provides compensation to claimants who have been diagnosed with one of the following diseases: leukemia, multiple myeloma, lymphomas, and a whole slew of cancers including some that most people are shocked to know exist like salivary cancer, which killed my grandmother. So far almost 40,000 claims have been approved with around 11,000 denied and the cost associated with those 40k claims has been $1.8 million. Source Lucky for them, by the time they passed this, many of the atomic veterans had already passed away like my grandfather's best friend who died of no less than 5 cancers.

Where they won't go is in doing any examination of any long term effects of radiation exposure in offspring. This study was about a 400 page explanation as to why it wasn't feasible to track birth defects and etc in offspring of atomic veterans and that's not counting downwinders and workers. iom.edu...

Good that this is getting more exposure, as it's an on going concern there, three years plus.

Good info(bookmarking for later)

stirling
Google Physicians for Social Responsibility....search for Hanford and you get a litany that includes but is by NO MEANS ALL of these facts.....
Hanford is....
The MOST POLLUTED site in the western hemisphere...
Cleanup will cost upwards of 60 Billion and take decades to complete
Contains 60% of ALL USA nuclear wastes....
They Have ....53 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks.....
SOME of which are leaking....
Total leakage is estimated at 0ne million gallons, to date (and its headed for the Columbia River.....
200 Sq miles are contaminated and 80 of those have ground water wells which are ABOVE SAFE LEVELS .....1600 waste sites have been identified to date on the nuclear reservation................
Much more on the web site..............

In case people missed the above post from stirling^^^. Seems to be some reasonably significant statistics. Not much of a strain to imagine the ongoing degradation of waste storage having an impact on the surrounding populace.

reply to post by mrwiffler


I think there is a lot of interesting different things coming up in this thread.
But what you quoted I find the most concerning because of it's time frame. All of these other issues can be dealt with in a timely fashion but this waste repository site is just a huge problem that only gets worse as time progresses.

We, the human race collectively, need to get off our butts and start brainstorming Solutions to clean up this mess.
And implement as many as possible that are viable.

It should be one of our species main priorities if we have any strategic interest of survival in the distant future.
We need Earth to be livable.

I'm not saying it's this one thing either,
there is pollution of all sorts encroaching upon us.

reply to post by muzzleflash



This won't make you feel better I guess but just shows how little we care really, when profits can be made:


Wrecking the Earth: Fracking has grave radiation risks few talk about
rt.com...

reply to post by stirling


Yep, Hanford is one of the EPA's superfund sites though it may not be the worst of them. There's some pretty toxic and nasty places in the US that are rife with lovely things such as PCPs, arsenic, lead, and radium. It's definitely high up on the list.

yosemite.epa.gov...

There have been a number of other "neural tube defects" noted around the country, and most of those have been correlated to toxic waste sites. Some of these sites contracted to accept just temporary waste collection and ended up with high rates of birth defects shortly thereafter (Brownsville, for instance).

Brownsville, Texas (1991)
Kettleman City, CA (2007 -)
Hinkley, CA (1996)
Herculaneum, Missouri
Dickson, Tennessee
Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

Just to name a scant few. What's appalling is hard it is to find anything detailed out about these statistics. The reports available do little more than note the birth defects. Seems it up to private non-profits to get to the root of the matter, industry and the government are doing nothing.

Skadi_the_Evil_Elf

FyreByrd

gymbeau2000

Of interest on YTC is a NSA listening post with a few huge dishes that goes 7 stories deep that covers all Pacific rim comms like phones, internet, etc.

That is of interest.

edit on 17-2-2014 by FyreByrd because: (no reason given)

Indeed. I had never even heard of it before now.........

That briefly twanged my interest, but then I thought about it. Listening, not broadcasting.

Passive dishes are not going to cause these problems. If they were active transmitters then yeah, it is pretty well established what magnetic fields can do regarding deformities.

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


This may sound silly, but correlation isn't causation.

What if:
1. The Iraq birth defects weren't caused by DU?
2. What if the tri-county Washington birth defects weren't caused by DU?
3. What if there is another issue at hand in both the Iraq and Washington cases that we don't know about?

Again, silly and a bit "conspiracy theory"-esque, I know. However, it's quite possible that what we are witnessing in both locations are being attributed to DU when in fact something else (perhaps more sinister) is going on?

reply to post by WCmutant


It's always possible, the more empirical data you have the more likely you will uncover the culprit behind these birth defects.

Another "Neural Tube Defects" hot zone is along the Texas-Mexico border, among them Brownsville TX, which has permitted toxic wastes to be dumped. Is that the cause? No one can yet say.

Neural tube defects on the Texas-Mexico border: what we've learned in the 20 years since the Brownsville cluster.

Neural Tube Defects and the Texas-Mexico Border

A lack of Folic acid is cited as a cause, but hardly explains the site-specific clustering that has been occurring. The problem for science is to take into account all the factors that might be causing it to happen. It will likely not be a single factor, like a specific type of radiation or a specific type of fertilizer or herbicide.