'Milk Teeth' and Fallout

Over 300,000 baby teeth were collected in the St. Louis area during the 1950s and 60s in order to study the link between above-ground atomic testing and human exposure to radioactivity. Researchers are now trying to track down some of those tooth donors in order to study correlations between fallout and subsequent health problems. From The Economist (yet another cute English phrase that I learned from The Economist: 'Milk Teeth'):

The radioactive isotope Strontium-90, one of the by-products of the bombs, spread into the atmosphere, fell onto the land, was ingested by dairy cows and passed into the milk supply. Strontium-90, like calcium, was concentrated in children’s teeth in detectable amounts.

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The rediscovery of the 85,000 samples, about a quarter of the total collected, has spurred a new effort to study the link between early childhood exposure and health problems in later life. There is already some evidence that 1950s children in St Louis grew into adults with a higher-than-average rate of cancer. Now researchers at the Radiation and Public Health Project, based in Brooklyn, are attempting to find more than 6,000 of the teeth donors to track their health problems or, in some cases, their premature deaths.

The RPHP has begun their work:

In a pilot project RPHP has found it is possible to identify a significant sample of teeth donors, finding current addresses for 80% of the male donors and death records for donors who died after 1971. Nearly half of the sampled surviving donors have expressed a willingness to complete a health history questionnaire.