Fifties nuclear bomb test fallout now putting millenials under threat

Recent authoritative reports state that the number of young people in the UK aged between 25 and 49 diagnosed with cancer has increased by 22 per cent, a bigger rise than any other age group and more than twice the 9 per cent increase in the over-75s prompting leading epidemiologists to call it an 'epidemic'.

'Millennials' people now in their 20s and 30s seem to be particularly at risk.

Professor Ketan Patel, chief scientist at Cancer Research UK, said: "Cancer is typically a disease of older age when there are more changes in the cells, some of which have the potential to become cancerous

"But over the last few decades, we have noticed an alarming uptick in certain types of cancer in the UK in much younger people, particularly colon, womb, breast and kidney cancer."

Even more alarming, cases of thyroid cancer, a known marker for radiation are also soaring among 15 to 39-year-olds, according to figures from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine in the U.S.

It states that between 1990 and 2019 there was an 81 per cent increase in cases in this age group in G20 nations, compared to a 24 per cent increase in all cancers.

And UK figures predict thyroid cancer cases overall will rise even further, by 74 per cent between 2014 and 2035.

What exactly is driving this dramatic rise in 'earlyonset' cancers is unclear, but it could be the effects of global fallout are now accelerating.

Early studies in America show that fallout from nuclear blasts at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas may have caused 10,000 to 75,000 thyroid cancers, 70 percent of which have not yet been diagnosed, the US National Cancer Institute reported.

Three-quarters of those cases were expected to develop in people who were younger than 5 at the time of exposure, which occurred in 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1957, the institute said Medical experts say that about 10 percent of such cancers are fatal "There were few, if any, Americans in the contiguous 48 states at the time that were not exposed to some level of fallout," said Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the institute The institute said the average dose to all Americans from the fallout was 2 rads to the thyroid A rad is a measure of radiation absorbed by flesh, and that amount is equal to the dose from five mammograms, officials said But some children appear to have received 100 rads, and all the exposure levels are uncertain The radiation exposure is from iodine 131, a radioactive form of iodine that is part of bomb fallout Iodine is concentrated in the milk of cows and goats because they eat grass that has been contaminated with the chemical. Estimates of exposure are based on the pattern of grazing and milk distribution and consumption

Worldwide, local indiginnous populations are known to have been seriously impacted by nuclear bomb tests And it is well-known that the offspring of servicemen exposed to nuclear blasts have been seriously impacted.

Studies by this newspaper and others have shown that radiogenic illnesses such as leukaemia and multiple myeloma are present in the offspring of nuclear veterans at levels way above normal And cases of Down's Syndrome, and other serious genetic illnesses are said to be 10 times the norm. Experts fear that the huge quastities of plutonium and other radionuclides hurled into the stratosphere from nuclear bomb tests are only now drifting back to earth and may explain increases in cancers and other illnesses