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Health risks of cattle grazing on radioactively contaminated land

Uranium, Cattle Grazing and Risks Unknown NYT. By LESLIE MACMILLAN 4 April 12,  As I reported last weekend in The Times, a cattle rancher stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the summer of 2010 on his grazing land, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon on the Navajo reservation, and notified federal officials. They came in with Geiger counters and found levels of radioactivity that were alarmingly high.

A year and a half later, the former mine in Cameron, Ariz., is not fenced off to either humans or animals, and cattle continue to roam through the site and eat grass that might be tainted with uranium and other toxic substances.

“Those cattle go to auction in Sun Valley and are sold on the open market,” said Ronald Tohannie, a project manager with the Navajo advocacy groupForgotten People. “Then people eat the meat.”

The owner of Valley Livestock Auction in Sun Valley, Ariz., Derrek Wagoner, confirmed that he buys cattle from the Navajo reservation and is aware that cattle graze on uranium mines there. He added that cattle come to him from all over the Southwest, where there are plenty of former uranium mines.

There is no dispute that beef and milk from those cattle make their way into the food chain. What is not precisely known is how much radioactive material plants absorb through the soil, how much the cattle ingest by grazing on the plants and what the effect might be on humans…..

After cattle are auctioned off, they go to various processing facilities where they are butchered and tested for contaminants under U.S.D.A. standards, Mr. Wagoner of the livestock auction company said.

However, federal standards do not include routine screening for toxic chemicals like uranium and its decay products. Standard testing includes biological contaminants like E. coli and salmonella and physical substances like bits of metal that might fall inside a meat grinder. . But beef is only spot-checked for chemical contaminants, said Janet McGinn, a senior officer with the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

When an animal is spot-checked for such substances, it is either because it was chosen as part of a random sampling of the entire population or because it is suspected to be ill.

The lack of data makes some experts uneasy. “We still can’t answer fundamental questions — are there wide population health effects due to uranium mining?” said Mr. Shuey, the environmental health specialist.
“Immune function, kidney disease, high blood pressure — all these things contribute to the burden of ill health” and could be affected by uranium, he said, “but we don’t know for sure.”

“Now there are companies that want to mine uranium again,” he said, “and we’re still a couple of generations away from dealing with the totality of that legacy.”

For people who make a living off the land, tainted cattle is a topic of endless speculation…. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/uranium-cattle-grazing-and-risks-unknown/

April 5, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Uranium, USA