Radiation and Public Health Project, Ocean City, NJ, USA.
Department of Epidemiology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Int J Soc Determinants Health Health Serv. 2023 Jul;53(3):374-384. doi: 10.1177/27551938231152771. Epub 2023 Jan 31.
Nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere during the 1950s and 1960s deposited fallout throughout the world, exposing all humans to food and water before the Limited Test Ban Treaty ended large-scale tests. The largest effort to measure in vivo fallout in humans, performed by Washington University (USA), collected over 300,000 deciduous teeth to document a sustained increase in Strontium-90 (Sr-90) during testing and a sharp decline after the test ban. Sr-90 patterns and trends in teeth were consistent with those of bones and milk. Sr-90 is still detectable in about 100,000 of the teeth, which were never tested. Tooth donors were born during atmospheric testing (1946-1965) and thus exposed to fallout in utero and during infancy/childhood, when exposures pose the greatest health risk. Preliminary analysis of global fallout's health risk in the United States indicates recent cancer mortality in several high-fallout areas exceeded that of states with the lowest fallout, peaking for the cohort born in the early 1960s, when fallout was highest. These findings support subsequent measurement of Sr-90 in deciduous teeth of persons who died of diseases such as cancer, along with controls, a novel approach to assessing fallout hazards.
20 世纪 50 年代和 60 年代在大气层中进行的核武器试验将沉降物散布到世界各地，在《有限禁止核试验条约》结束大规模试验之前，所有人类都接触到了食物和水。美国华盛顿大学进行了最大规模的人体沉降物测量工作，收集了超过 30 万颗乳牙，以记录在试验期间锶-90（Sr-90）的持续增加以及试验禁令后急剧下降的情况。牙齿中的 Sr-90 模式和趋势与骨骼和牛奶中的一致。大约有 10 万颗从未经过测试的牙齿仍可检测到 Sr-90。牙捐赠者出生于大气试验期间（1946-1965 年），因此在子宫内和婴儿期/儿童期受到沉降物的暴露，此时暴露对健康的风险最大。对美国全球沉降物健康风险的初步分析表明，几个高沉降物地区的最近癌症死亡率超过了沉降物最低的州，出生于 20 世纪 60 年代初的队列的癌症死亡率达到峰值，当时沉降物最高。这些发现支持随后对死于癌症等疾病的人的乳牙中的 Sr-90 进行测量，并与对照组一起进行，这是一种评估沉降物危害的新方法。
