[News]They had a fairytale American childhood - but was radiation slowly killing them?

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Radioactive material was dumped near the creek after World War Two

 

After Kim Visintine put her son to bed every night at a hospital in St Louis, Missouri, she spent her evening in the hospital’s library. She was determined to know how her boy had become seriously ill with a rare brain tumour at just a week old.

"Doctors were shocked," she says. "We were told that his illness was one in a million. Other parents were learning to change diapers but I was learning how to change chemotherapy ports and IVs."

Kim’s son Zack was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme. It is a brain tumour that is very rare in children and is usually seen in adults over 45.

Zack had chemotherapy treatments but doctors said there was no hope of him ever recovering. He died at just six years old.

Years later, social media and community chatter made Kim start to think that her son was not an isolated case. Perhaps he was part of a bigger picture growing in their community surrounding Coldwater Creek.

In this part of the US, cancer fears have prompted locals to accuse officials of not doing enough to support those who may have been exposed to radiation due to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s.

A compensation programme that was designed to pay out to some Americans who contracted diseases after exposure to radiation expired last year - before it could be extended to the St Louis area.

This Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (Reca) provided one-time payouts to people who may have developed cancer or other diseases while living in areas where activities such as atomic weapons testing took place. It paid out $2.6bn (£2bn) to more than 41,000 claimants before coming to an end in 2024.

Among the areas covered were parts of New Mexico, where the world's first test of a nuclear weapon took place in 1945. Research published in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute suggested that hundreds of cancers in the area would not have occurred without radiation exposure.

St Louis, meanwhile, was where uranium was refined and used to help create the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. After World War Two ended, the chemical was dumped near the creek and left uncovered, allowing waste to seep into the area.

Decades later, federal investigators acknowledged an increased cancer risk for some people who played in the creek as children, but added in their report: "The predicted increases in the number of cancer cases from exposures are small, and no method exists to link a particular cancer with this exposure."

The clean-up of the creek is still ongoing and is not expected to finish until 2038.

A new bill has been put forward in the House, and Josh Hawley, a US senator representing Missouri, says he has raised the issue with President Donald Trump.

 

 

Karen Nickel says growing up near Coldwater Creek was idyllic - but many locals ended up with rare cancers

 

When Kim flicks through her school yearbook, she can identify those who have become sick and those who have since passed away. The numbers are startling.

"My husband didn’t grow up in this area, and he said to me, 'Kim, this is not normal. It seems like we’re always talking about one of your friends passing away or going to a funeral'," she says.

Just streets away from the creek, Karen Nickel grew up spending her days near the water picking berries, or in the nearby park playing baseball. Her brother would often try and catch fish in Coldwater Creek.

"I always tell people that we had just the fairytale childhood that you would expect in what you consider suburban America," says Karen. "Big backyards, big families, children playing out together until the street lights came on at night."

But years later, her carefree childhood now looks very different.

"Fifteen people from the street I grew up on have died from rare cancers," she says. "We have neighbourhoods here where every house has been affected by some cancer or some illness. We have streets where you can’t just find a house where a family has not been affected by this."

When Karen’s sister was just 11 years old, doctors discovered that her ovaries were covered in cysts. The same had happened to their neighbour when she was just nine. Karen’s six-year-old granddaughter was born with a mass on her right ovary.

Karen helped found Just Moms STL, a group that is dedicated to protecting the community from future exposures that could be linked to cancers - and which advocates for a clean-up of the area.

"We get messages every day from people that are suffering from illnesses and are questioning whether this is from exposure," she says. "These are very aggressive illnesses that the community is getting, from cancers all the way to autoimmune diseases."

 

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