Montana: radon gas & reproduction experiment

Pierre

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In the first Cs session (16/07/1994), one of the first remarks is:

Q: (L) What else do you have to tell us?
A: Montana Experiment with human reproduction. All people there
are being exposed to harmful radon gas. (bold mine)

From Wikipedia, one can learn the basics of radon:

Radon is a radioactive, odorless gas. It is the heaviest known gas [...]. Radon caged inside a fullerene has been proposed as a drug for tumors.[29][30]

The danger of high exposure to radon in mines, where exposures can reach 1,000,000 Bq/m3, has long been known. In 1530, Paracelsus described a wasting disease of miners, the mala metallorum, and Georg Agricola recommended ventilation in mines to avoid this mountain sickness.

Radon is produced by the radioactive decay of radium-226, which is found in uranium ores, phosphate rock, shales, igneous and metamorphic rocks such as granite, gneiss, and schist

We also learn that radon is a real problem in the US, with 21,000 killed each year. The areas rich in uranium are logically more affected as described by Wikipedia:

Some of the highest radon hazard in the US is found in Iowa and in the Appalachian Mountain areas in southeastern Pennsylvania. Iowa has the highest average radon concentrations in the US

Unfortunately, there is not one single mention of Montana. It surprising because there is actually a lot of radon in Montana:

Most counties in Montana have radon levels that exceed 4 pCi/L while seven counties had levels between 2 and 4 pCi/L
Source

4pCi/l (Pico Curie per liter) is equivalent to 100 chest X-ray. The source above was alarming and it triggered the writing of a paper debunking the alarm and drawing an unexpected conclusion:

On average, the lung cancer death rate was higher in the lower radon county compared to the higher radon level counties, though this difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.30)

The positive spin given to radioactive radiations doesn't end here. Actually, Montana is the only place in the US where you can find health mines:

There are only four radon health mines in the United States, and all four of them are located within twenty minutes’ drive of each other in the Boulder-Basin area south of Helena.

freenterprisepeople

'Patients' being treated inside a radon 'health' mine

According to the Free Enterprise Mine, one of the companies operating those radon mines, the radioactive exposure brings health benefits:

The suffering come from all over the country in hopes of testing the mine’s curative powers. Visitors assert that a little poison may not be a dangerous thing and limited exposure does what orthodox medications cannot by providing relief from constant pain and remission from disease.[...]
Woes come in all forms, from hypertension to arthritis, and some say the radon mines help when medications haven’t.

According the WHO, the max level of radiation is 2.7 pCi/l, the radon mines provide a level of radiation that is 630 times higher:

highly radioactive gas fluctuate between 700 to 2,200picoCuries per liter of air. On average, they are about 1700 pC/l.

But, in Montana, even the ones who don't pay to access the radon 'health' mines, are also subjected to contamination. It appears that well water is heavily contaminated too. Those findings were presented in a paper published in 2015 in the Geoscience journal:

Exposure to uranium can damage kidneys, increase long term risks of various cancers, and cause developmental and reproductive effects. Historically, home well water in Montana has not been tested for uranium. Data for the Crow Reservation from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Uranium Resource Evaluation (NURE) database showed that water from 34 of 189 wells tested had uranium over the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 30 μg/L for drinking water
.

Actually there are about 20 abandoned uranium mines South West of the crow reservation. Those mines are located around the source of the big horn river that goes through the whole reservation and through the whole state of Montana.


Image result for crow reservation montana uranium

Map of the Crow reservation. Uranium mines are represented by yellow circles.

A paper published in 2005 in the Review of Environmental Health demonstrates the relation between exposure to radiation and reproductive issues, it also shows that the current safety levels don't necessarily prevent health issues, quite the contrary:

However, even with an action level of 2.0 pCi/L, the cancer risk presented by radon gas is still hundreds of times greater than the risks allowed for carcinogens in our food and water.
Source

Now, if we have a look at reproduction experiments in Montana, it appears that Montana passed a eugenics law in 1923. This law was only repealed in 1981 and led to the sterilization of 256 individuals (mostly incarcerated, poor and disabled people) between 1923 and 1951.

More recently, in the early 1970's a peculiar case, still in Montana, emerged in the news:

Two young women entered an IHs hospital in Montana to undergo appendectomies and received tubal ligations, a form of sterilization, as an added benefit.
Bertha Medicine Bull, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, related how the "two girls had been sterilized at age fifteen before they had any children. Both were having appendectomies when the doctors sterilized them without their knowledge or consent.

Actually the above case is not isolated. Forced sterilization was a procedure done by the Indian Health Service (IHS) in the 1960s and 1970s. It obviously worked since 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized. As a result average birth rates of native Americans dropped drastically from 3.7 in the 1970s to 1.8 in 1980.

From the above, we can see that Montana implemented enforced sterilization and faces high levels of radiation. But what about mass sterilization through radiation as hinted by the Cs?

The most documented case of mass sterilization through radiation is, of course, the Nazis. In particular the infamous Dr Horst Schumann and Victor Brack who used radiations for sterilizing hundreds of Auschwitz and Birkenau inmates:

The first is an affidavit by a young Pole born in I920, an inmate of Auschwitz, who was transferred to Birkenau to be X-rayed. He says: "We had to undress and our sexual organs were placed under an apparatus and kept there under the apparatus for fifteen minutes. The apparatus strongly heated the sexual organs and the surrounding parts, and later on these parts began to show a black colour. After this treatment we had to work again right away. After some days, the sexual organs of most of my comrades became purulent and they had great difficulties in walking. In spite of this, they had to work until they collapsed and those who collapsed were sent to the gas chambers"

Of course only the Nazis could commit such horror, or so we're told. Problem is that project Paperclip brought several German doctors to the US among whom Herbert Gerstner, a Nazi doctor specialized in electrocution and radiation.

Gerstner and Koeppen conducted a series of experiments on untold numbers of human subjects designed to compare the wounds inflicted upon human skin from burns and electrocution. The scant files that remain on these experiments indicate that the two researchers had ample supplies of “fresh human skin” that is believed to have come in part from the “feeble minded” children exterminated by the T4 program. Remarkably, when Gerstner was first interviewed by Project Paperclip officials, before being sent to the U.S., he admitted to using human subjects in his experiments, explaining that from 1937 through to 1939 he used subjects that were “cancer patients” and “old people and young people who were sick.”

When Gerstner was recruited by Paperclip officials for work in San Antonio at the M.D. Anderson Hospital for Cancer Research his research in Nazi Germany made him a perfect match for the objectives of the Air Force and CIA, both of which were most interested in learning all that they could about how many flights a pilot of a nuclear-powered aircraft might take without harmful radiation exposure, as well as how to treat radiation and electrical burns on human flesh. Dr. Gerstner’s Texas cancer patients never for a moment suspected that their treatment at the hands of Gerstner and his associates was not in their best interest or aimed at curing their illness. Even when they became deathly sick with constant vomiting, dehydration, skin lesions, and rapid weight loss, Gerstner’s patients did not suspect that they were being administered an extreme amount of X-ray dosages that would eventually kill them

Gerstner and others conducted radiation experiments in the US soon after WW2:

There were thirteen deliberate releases of radioactive material over US and Canadian cities between 1948 and 1952 to study fallout patterns and the decay of radioactive particles. There were dozens of experiments funded by the CIA and Atomic Energy Commission, often conducted by scientists at UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt and MIT, which exposed more than 2,000 unknowing people to radiation scans.
Source

The experiments went on for decades since we find radiations experiments conducted on inmates reproductive organs in the 1960's, not directly in Montana but in the nearby states of Oregon and Washington. The modus Operandi is strikingly similar to the one described above by the Auschwitz Polish inmate:

In 1963 133 prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their scrotums and testicles exposed to 600 roentgens of radiation [...] In defending the sterilization experiments, Dr. Victor Bond, a physician at the Brookhaven nuclear lab, said, “It’s useful to know what dose of radiation sterilizes. It’s useful to know what different doses of radiation will do to human beings.”
One of Bond’s colleagues, Dr. Joseph Hamilton of the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, said more candidly that the radiation experiments “had a little of the Buchenwald touch.”
Source

One might think that 5 decades of sterilization experiments based on radiation is long enough to gather results and turn the page. Apparently not, since the 1994 presidential commission set up by Hazel O'Leary discovered similar practices in Georgetown University from the 1950's to 1977:

The commission’s final report cites CIA records showing that the Agency secretly funded the construction of a wing of Georgetown University Hospital in the 1950s. This was to become a haven for CIA-sponsored research on chemical and biological programs. The CIA’s money for this went via a pass-through to Dr. Charles F. Geschickter, who ran the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. The doctor was a Georgetown cancer researcher who made his name experimenting with high doses of radiation. In 1977 Dr. Geschickter testified that the CIA paid for his radio-isotope lab and equipment and closely monitored his research.
Source

This is probably not the full extent of the CIA's role in experimenting radiations on human beings. But, in 1973 Richard Helms officially discontinued such experiments and ordered all records destroyed, saying that he did not want the Agency’s associates in such work to be “embarrassed.”
 
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