Leuren Moret, an environmental scientist, scares the crap out of me in a way that I haven’t felt since I read Nevil Shute’s On The Beach–and that was fiction, this is not. Why– because I believe that she is entirely correct in her understanding of the toxic impact of uranium and radioactive contamination. In a new article published in Namaste Magazine entitled Populations Exposed To Environmental Uranium: Increased Risk of Infertility and Reproductive Cancers, Moret talks about the “increased risk of infertility and reproductive cancers” as well as the likely connection between uranium and diabetes and autism. Moret’s article tackles numerous aspects of the impact of uranium on human health and is a landmark effort to connect some dots that definitely need to be connected. Here are some of the astounding issues that Moret examines:
“It was a surprise to discover that Livermore Nuclear weapons Lab has not only secretly conducted extensive global monitoring of ionizing radiation for decades, but local ionizing radiation monitoring as well. In fact, I saw fresh core samples from Hiroshima and Nagasaki lying on a table in a Livermore environmental laboratory in 1991. When I asked Dr. Kai Wong, a Livermore lab ionizing radiation expert, why they were still monitoring Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said:
“Because Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still radioactive. And we are still studying the people because they are too.””
“A global diabetes epidemic, beginning in 1945 with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has had a major contribution from the effects of uranium pollution from atmospheric testing, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weaponry introduced to the battlefield in 1991. Uranium is particularly damaging to the pancreas, insulin production, information flow, and cell function. And diabetes in pregnant women has a serious effect on the foetus.
Pancreatic cancer mortality in Japanese males increased 12-fold between 1945 and 1965, during the peak of atmospheric testing.”
“When the results of mud samples from the Marin County bay side shoreline and the Pacific coastline are analyzed and reported, low-level ionizing radiation from the Sierras will be identified as the cause of what may be the highest breast cancer incidence in the United States. High rates of autism also occur in areas, between the Sierras and Marin County, in low energy slow water environments where swampy still water and mudflats occur, and are recharged with contaminated water washing down from the Sierras. The California Department of Developmental Services (DDS) found a 273 percent increase in autism cases between 1987 and 1998. This is due not only to residual ionizing radiation washing out of the Sierras, but also to the nuclear power industry in California.”
“(D)uring a breast cancer conference on January 21, 2006, by the Bay Area Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Center (BABCERC), University of California scientist Dr. Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, introduced herself as “the mouse lady”. She stated very clearly, during her presentation to 600 women, that “radiation is the only known cause of breast cancer in mice.” She repeatedly mentioned in her talk that “Radiation is the only known cause of breast cancer in mice and that is why I use it to cause breast cancer in mice.” She concluded her talk, by saying that in their research they “never identified the cause of breast cancer in women”.
No, but hundreds of millions of dollars later, they sure did in mice… ionizing radiation.”
“Breast cancer is the number two killer of Navajo women after heart disease. Uterine and ovarian cancers doubled or tripled since 1970 in New Mexico Indians, with no change in whites and Hispanics.”
The data in Raymond-Whish’s work supports,
“(T)he conclusion that uranium is an endocrine-disrupting chemical and populations exposed to environmental uranium should be followed for increased risk of fertility problems and reproductive cancers.”
In her conclusion, Moret states,
“Since 1945, the University of California and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Labs together with other nuclear states have blanketed Planet Earth and the global atmosphere with accumulating uranium and fission products with an unknown biological outcome. This is very significant because low level uranium contamination, even below EPA drinking water standards, is an estrogen or hormone disruptor at a minimum, which means it will have a global affect, and not just on females of many species. Raymond-Whist has identified some of the effects in one biological system (reproductive), which is a part of a larger cooperating set of systems in a human or animal super-system. Her research predicts that infertility will increase in each future generation because of chronic low-level ionizing radiation exposure, cancers of reproductive organs in females will increase, and the viability of future generations will decline.
The link between diabetes and uranium exposure is also significant to the reproductive system, since pregnant women who have diabetes and little or no health care produce unhealthy babies.The impact of uranium on the pancreas and production and function of insulin, another hormone, is very significant damage to another system.”
Okay, these are only snippets from a long article with a lot of footnotes which you should read in in its entirety. But I hope by now you are quaking in your boots and wondering if you’ll be able to sleep tonight. Uranium and radiation aren’t the only things wreaking havoc on the health of this planet–genetically modified food, pesticides, other kinds of pollution and carcinogens, to name a few other major culprits, and there is much work to be done still to understand exactly how all of this works, but we can’t wait for that work to take Moret seriously because the problem is that what she says makes intuitive sense and the consequences are so catastrophic that we need to start accepting this paradigm of understanding in our public policy NOW.
One Response to “Leuren Moret On The Far-Reaching Harms Of Uranium and Radiation”
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This is a very good summary of my article “Populations Exposed to Environmental Uranium: Increased Risk of Reproductive Cancers and Infertility”. From exposure of an organism in its developmental stages, ionizing radiation is 10-100 million times more damaging than the most toxic chemicals such as thalidomide. This means that huge increases in manmade ionizing radiation contaminating the biosphere since the Manhattan Project in WW II has devastated not just humans, but all living things. Even worse, the synergistic effects of other biotoxins such as GMO, chemicals, pesticides, persistent jet contrails, fluoride in drinking water, vaccines, and even processed foods, multiply the effects of each other by many times. It is the collective impact of all those biotoxins that is destroying the genome of the entire planet. The introduction of depleted uranium weaponry to the battlefield in 1991 – at enormous profit by President George Herbert Walker Bush and the Carlyle Group – has blanketed the world and contaminated the biosphere with uranium contamination. It is a covert nuclear war against all living species… and the effects are already apparent. Radiation is different. There is no way to turn it off, no way to clean it up, and it is the weapon that keeps giving and keeps killing. Radiation respects no borders, no socioeconomic class and no religion. Ionizing radiation and life are incompatible.