Children who lived near a St. Louis creek polluted with radioactive atomic bomb waste from the 1940s through the 1960s were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer over their lifetimes than children who lived farther from the waterway, a new study has found.
The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, corroborate worries that neighbors of Coldwater Creek have long held about the Missouri River tributary where generations of children played.
“We actually saw something quite dramatic, not only elevated risk of cancer, but one that increased steadily in a sort of dose-response manner the closer the childhood residents got to Coldwater Creek,” said the study’s senior author, Marc Weisskopf, an epidemiology professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health…