Army: No health risk from secret St. Louis testing

[unhappycamper]

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Army-No-health-risk-from-secret-St-Louis-testing-4003974.php

Army: No health risk from secret St. Louis testing
JIM SALTER, Associated Press
Updated 3:27 p.m., Friday, November 2, 2012

ST. LOUIS (AP) — An Army investigation into secret chemical testing in impoverished areas of St. Louis during the Cold War era has corroborated three previous studies that the testing posed no health risk to those who lived in the areas, according to a letter from a top Army official.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, on schools and in other locations to spray zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder, into the air. The testing was part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack.

Both of Missouri's U.S. senators, Republican Roy Blunt and Democrat Claire McCaskill, wrote to the Army after learning of St. Louis professor Lisa Martino-Taylor's research about the program.

~snip~

The secret testing was exposed to Congress in 1994, prompting a demand for a health study. A committee of the National Research Council determined in 1997 that the testing did not expose residents to harmful levels of the chemical. The Army followed up that study with a toxicological study in 1998. Hammack said in the letter that the 1998 study found no evidence of harm.



unhappycamper comment: This is the same Army that brought Agent(s) Orange/White/Purple to you in the 60/70's and the same Army that was big on personality defect discharges during the first decade of this century. It's also the same military that brought burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan and Djibouti to a new low/high in this century as well as tainted water for over 50 years at Camp Lejune, North Carolina.