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Navajos’ cancer rates up, due to uranium mining

Cancer rates among Navajo from uranium mining, New Mexico

Nukes mean mines
Are we digging a new toxic legacy before the last one’s filled in?
CURRENT By <!– –>Greg Harman16 Sept 09
“………….When it comes to open-pit carnage, some of the worst damage has been done to indigenous lands, like the Navajo territory in New Mexico, where workers dug uranium ore in underground mines without the benefit of safety equipment. As in Karnes, the land around Church Rock, New Mexico, outside Gallup, is marked by abandoned mines and milling sites, but this area has the unwelcome distinction of also being the site of the second-largest non-weapons-related radiological release in history, the largest being the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986.

It happened just a few months after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979. An estimated 90-million gallons of liquid radioactive waste burst through a dam wall at a uranium-processing mill owned by United Nuclear Corps, flooding farmland, arroyos, and fields, and permanently contaminating the Rio Puerco River.

Despite adamant resistance from the Navajo and other nearby tribes, a subsidiary of one prominent Texas mining outfit, Uranium Resources, Inc., is petitioning the state of New Mexico to gain access to Church Rock for another go. Recently, tensions between the Navajo’s objection to mining and those anxious for jobs in the area spilled over in an attack on five Navajo men in Grants, New Mexico………….

Native American communities throughout the Southwest have experienced high levels of kidney diseases and cancer thought to be related to uranium mining. While cancer was once something of an anomaly among the Navajo, after 30 years of heavy mining activity, cancer rates in Navajo Country began to shoot upward, doubling by the late ’90s, according to Indian Health Service data. Still, no study of the residents around Church Rock has ever been performed,

SA Current – NEWS+FEATURES: Nukes mean mines

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This entry was posted on September 26, 2009 at 7:14 am and is filed under indigenous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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