Story:
In the late 1940s, United States citizens were injected with Plutonium without their knowledge.
Analysis:
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This is a shocking message which states that a US government program in the late 1940s has injected the United States citizens with dangerous Plutonium and Uranium without their knowledge. Unfortunately, this is a fact.
The Reasons
The secret program which is now admitted to be true actually involved the doctors and scientists working for the United States government, who injected many unknowing human ‘participants’ with highly toxic and radio active Plutonium. This was done as a part of a secret experiment to study how the unknowing participants suffered because of the Plutonium injection.
These dangerous human experiments began in 1945, when Manhattan Project scientists were conducting experiments and preparing to detonate the first atomic bomb. Radiation was known to be dangerous at that time, so these experiments were designed to study the detailed effects of radiation on human health.
How it Started
It started in 1945, when Ebb Cade, an African American worker at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility met with a car accident. Ebb Cade survived the accident and was declared as healthy by the doctors, but he was made as a human participant in this disturbing study – without his consent. On April 10th 1945, the doctors secretly injected Ebb with 4.7 micrograms of Plutonium.
For the next five days after injecting the radio active substance, the doctors closely examined him and conducted many invasive tests like taking bone samples to study how Plutonium retained and damaged his body. Fifteen of his teeth were pulled and sampled for testing Plutonium. Ebb Cade was never informed about the reasons for any of these examinations, although he might have had an idea of what was happening with him. It was reported that Ebb ran away from the hospital one night. However, he died of heart failure in 1953, becoming the first victim to be injected with plutonium in the United States. He was not the last one though!
The next three victims of this poisonous injections were patients suffering from cancer who came for the treatment into Billings Hospital of Chicago. One person whose identity is not known was injected with 95 micrograms of Plutonium, which is a deadly dose. He was not mentioned in many official reports, and the date of his death was also not known. The next venue for this dangerous study was the University of Rochester, which also started injecting other radioactive isotopes, including Polonium and Uranium. The director of this program there once wrote that almost all the injected patients had diagnoses which meant that they were unlikely to live for more than five years. Researchers at the University of California also took part in these experiments. In May 1945, Albert Stevens came there to treat his stomach cancer, but was injected with Plutonium. After the injection, it was found that his cancer was actually an ulcer. When Stevens wanted to leave, he was offered a stipend to stay in the area, so that the researchers could continue to test him for radiation, but like in previous cases, he was never told about the injection.
How it was Disclosed
Investigations into these plutonium injections began in 1970s, but these alarming facts were always covered up. Some people among those eighteen known victims of Plutonium injections died and their dead bodies were even exhumed for further radiation tests. Their families were told that they had received an unknown mixture of isotopes as a part of their medical treatment. In 1974, after a full investigation, the surviving patients were informed about the Plutonium injections and the families of the deceased were also informed.
Starting from 15 November 1993, Eileen Welsome, a Denver-based journalist revealed a six-year investigation into these human radiation experiments, while she was reporting a 3-part story titled “The Plutonium Experiment” for The Albuquerque Tribune. In 1994, Eileen Welsome in fact received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. She also wrote a book on this called “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War“, which gives a detailed account of these inhuman scientific experiments conducted by the U.S. government. According to her, most of the subjects in these radiation experiments were poor, powerless, and sick. And most certainly, apart from these 18 known people to have been injected with radioactive Plutonium, there would be many more victims not on record.
You can watch the related report of Democracy Now in the video shown, interviewing Eileen Welsome. It discloses more disturbing facts:
- In a Massachusetts school, 73 disabled children were spoon fed oatmeal that contained radioactive calcium and other radio isotopes. This was told as a ‘nutrition’ study and it went on for a number of years, without the kids and their parents knowing what was happening with them.
- Immediately after World War II, in Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women were given radioactive iron as part of their regular vitamin treatment. But in fact, this inhuman experiment was meant to study how fast the radio iodine crossed into the placenta. These pregnant women had many kinds of ailments, like skin diseases, cancer and blood disorders. Some of their offsprings that they were carrying died of cancer, others also had very strange cancers at young ages.
- There was also the disbursing of radio activity in the air over cities, at schools, the famous one being the Green Run at the Hanford Reservation.
The Government’s Take
The US government covered up most of these radiation experiments and mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton changed policies and the federal agencies then made available records dealing with these human radiation experiments. An investigation undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments issued a controversial report in 1995 which said that “wrongs were committed”.
It is sad to know that many human radiation experiments like this have been performed in the United States, many of which were in fact funded by various U.S. government agencies like the United States Department of Defense and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. These radiation experiments have been performed to understand the effects of ionizing radiation and study the radioactive contamination on the human body. But the human victims of such experiments end up as specimens!
Hoax or Fact:
Fact.
References:
A US government program secretly injected people with plutonium
The Plutonium Files
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