According to a new study, children who grew up in the 1940s through the 1960s and lived near a St. Louis creek polluted with radioactive atomic bomb waste were likely to be diagnosed with cancer over their lifetimes. The study’s findings examined baby teeth to investigate proximity to the creek and cancer risk.
Speculation held by neighbors of Coldwater Creek where children played for generations was confirmed in the study’s report titled Cancer Incidence and Childhood Residence Near the Coldwater Creek Radioactive Waste site, which was published in JAMA Network Open.
“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,” Marc Weisskopf, the study’s senior author and an epidemiology professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said.
While Weisskopf and his research team originally planned to study cognitive decline with the old baby teeth, participants, who were born between 1945 and 1966, joined the new experiment between 2021 and 2024, NPR reported. The study’s abstract confirmed that “beginning in the 1940s, radioactive waste from the effort to develop an atomic bomb was stored in the open near the St Louis, Missouri, airport, and over several decades contaminated nearby Coldwater Creek.”
Of the 4,209 participants, one-quarter reported having cancer. Participants who lived within one kilometer of the Coldwater Creek were 44 percent more likely to have cancer than others who lived more than 20 kilometers outside the creek. Of these participants, 85 percent were more likely to have radiosensitive cancers, which are cancers that are said to be caused by radiation.
“This study adds to our understanding that radiation is carcinogenic and that we have to be cautious to minimize exposures to radiation wherever possible,” Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a radiologist and epidemiology professor at the University of California, said. “The main source of exposure today comes from medical imaging.”
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” contained a provision that helps people monetarily who had adverse health effects to nuclear waste in Missouri and other states. The provision pays $25,000 to families of people who died from radiation-linked cancers in St. Louis and $50,00 to surviving cancer victims, NPR reported.
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