Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an unnecessary study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I'm sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians.

By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2]

1 - https://misasaonsen.jp/en/radon/

2 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37635139/

"Through this case study, the author explores how a large number of participants inside an organization will willingly participate in organizational acts that are harmful to others, and how large numbers of outsiders, who may or may not be victims of organizational activities, are unable to determine illegal or harmful activity by an organization."

Truly unsettling. Everyday Americans secretly exploited by their own government. If this were punishment for a crime, it would be unconstitutional due to being cruel, inhumane, and without due process. But it wasn't punishment for anything, the government just attacked them.

St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It remains a problem to this day.

Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers claim it's no big deal.

When I am bitter about the state of academia I remind my self that research in medicine especially on mental patients used to be horrendous.

These mocked ethics commitees are there for a good reason.

Server appears to be getting hugged to death. Here is the archive link.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220222075908/https://mospace.u...

This reminds me of another story. Apparently zinc cadmium sulfide was dropped on Canadians by the US military in 1953 -- 2 Albertan towns, and Winnipeg. The timing was so close it made me wonder if it was part of the same program. It seems so, Winnipeg is mentioned in the full research paper.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/u-s-secretly-tested-car...

Unless, I'm mistaken, this was at Pruitt-Igoe, the first US housing project, torn down in the 70s. The testing was long thought to be some kind of "conspiracy theory," which is a wonderful way to dismiss any claims of official abuse.

The first link DDG gave me:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-experimented-victims-s...

"But not all Ikariots enjoy the same degree of longevity. Data from the ongoing study shows that people living in the northern part of the island outlive those inhabiting the southern part, and therein lies the mystery. Presumably southern Ikariots have no significant dietary differences from their northern counterparts—nor would genetics make sense, since there’s little chance of finding genetically isolated populations on a small island. That’s why some experts have proposed one possible reason for this discordant longevity—geology"

The north and northwest of the island are predominated by granite rocks, which naturally contain trace amounts of uranium and are known to emit very low doses of gamma radiation, between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually—somewhere in between the amount of radiation you would absorb from a single chest X-ray and a more-powerful CT scan.

“To the south of the island, on the contrary, limestone predominates,” says Christodoulos Stefanadis, professor of cardiology at the National University of Athens and the Ikaria study’s head researcher. Statistically, people in the north of the island live significantly longer than those to the south. In 2001, the northern part of the island had 11 male and 22 female nonagenarians and centenarians out of a total of 1,452 male and 1,359 female inhabitants—whereas only five out of 1,691 men and 19 out of 1,710 women were over 90 in the southern part.

Stefanadis says this appears to be tied to the excess in gamma rays in the north, which are between 0.20 and 3.31 millisievert annually (over and above a universally “normal” amount of gamma rays would be about 1 to 2 millisievert per year). “This radiation difference is an independent prognostic factor of longevity,” Stefanadis says, though he is quick to add there is not enough evidence to confirm this definitively, simply because the question has not been properly investigated.

https://proto.life/2021/11/ikaria-the-island-of-mysterious-l...

Very interested in this (the metastatic effects of secrecy in sensitivd projects that lack what you might call a 'secrecy-self-kill-switch' built-in from conception), thank you for posting.

> A government study found that in a worst-case scenario, “repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity and lung cancer.” Yet the Army contends there is no evidence anyone in St. Louis was harmed.

> A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement to the AP that health assessments performed by the Army “concluded that exposure would not pose a health risk,” and follow-up independent studies also found no cause for alarm.

This whole thing is outrageous.

“Why don’t people trust the government with vaccines???”

Meanwhile. The government.

That has to be the most disturbing abstract I've ever read.

Clearly, that is proof that the government has conspired to harm its own citizens in the past.

This precedent makes it clear that those who opposed COVID19 vaccines were not 'crazy conspiracy theorists' as the media led everyone to believe but were in fact potentially very reasonable people. Every person who called anti-vaxers 'crazy' essentially engaged in gaslighting. Firing unvaccinated employees was an act of pure malevolence.

Do you think you would trust a vaccine from the government if that same government had sprayed your grandparents with radioactive materials? Yet that's exactly what was being asked of some people during COVID19 pandemic.

It's disturbing how few people can understand the evil behind vaccine mandates. Variants of the story above were literally what many people faced. Many people can clearly remember instances of government abuse directed against their family members. You cannot expect, much less force such people to trust the government.

If you suspect that you may have become a member of the underclass, you are right to assume that you may become a target of the government and you have the right to protect yourself.

It sounds insane to say it like that, but this is the reality that the government has created. It has made it rational to be paranoid.

The government has many tentacles and each tentacle doesn't necessarily know what the other tentacles are doing. It's foolish to assume that the government can always be trusted. It can never be fully trusted. The government shouldn't even trust itself. It should be designed with that in mind.

TLDR: they wanted to study how aerosols disperse in cities and they underestimated or ignored the risks of the tracer they used.

[dead]