What Killed John Wayne? Do you know the answer?
[url]https://www.themedicalbag.com/story/john-wayne[/url]
Interesting to me. What do you think? Silent killer and creater of cancers radiation in low doses over time or in high doses for a short time can shorten human life. Read the story about the reason why some of these famous actors may have died due to radiation poisoning at a film site 137 miles downwind of the place in Nevada or Utah where the US Government set off several atomic bombs in the air. The radio active fall out drifted down wind and settled to the ground. The soil was contaminated by the radio active fallout. When the winds blew the dust around the film set it got all over the actors. They breath the dust into their lungs and it got in the food and drink which then they ingested while on the set. They got it on their cloths and skin. They were contaminated while filming and didn't even know it. Only later we put the pieces together.
Environmental Science was my mayor in school and I also studied for entry into Veterinary Medical School. They call it Pre-Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University. I took a class in Bionucleonics that taught the students in that class how to measure for radiation. We had to watch the Professor's Graduate Students use the machine that measured the radiation in our samples. We studied all types of environmental testing procedures from measuring the amount of sulfur in an air sample to the number of different types of species in a stream to determine the water quality of the stream. We took measurements of the amount of chemicals dissolved in the water of the stream. We went out into the field to sample the streams water quality and also the different organisms that lived in the stream. I probably got more hands on job experience from this one class that actually helped me land my first job at the EPA. The questions that the director asked me during my interview were all things that I knew and had learned about in this one class that I took. All my other college classes were actually just to prepare me for this one class. So when I read about the John Wayne Story above I was better prepared to really understand what happened. So I found this very interesting.
There is another story about Steve McQueen another famous actor who died from exposure to Asbestos. He died from mesotheiolomia which is a disease of the lungs that's caused by asbestos fibers in the lungs. Steve also was a smoker. Did you know that your risk of getting cancer is ten times greater if you smoke than if you don't smoke and that it's 5 time greater if you are exposed to asbestos. But if you smoke and are also exposed to asbestos fibers you have a 50x's greater chance of getting lung cancer.
Some time I wish I didn't know about these things. They say that ignorance is bliss but it also can kill you like it did John Wayne.
Some of these environmental toxins take a while to do their work. They are insidious and silent killers.
The headlines on CNN's web site today read about a Nuclear Problem with another Nuclear Reactor in Ukrainian. They have an emergency situation there. Do you remember what happened in Chernobyl? The other day there was a video of a drone flying though a ghost down in Ukraine where the Reactor's fire contaminated the town and now it's a Ghost Town. Some guy got permission to go there and he used a remote controlled drone plane carrying a camera onboard to fly around and film the deserted town. Kind of spooky if you ask me. I think it's been over 30 years since that accident shut down a huge swath of land in that part of the world. Radiation from that accident drifted around the world.
Now we have Fukushima in Japan to deal with as the radiation from that accident has reached across the Pacific Ocean and may be causing the deaths of star fish all along the Western US Coast line. I did read a story about these starfish all dying in mass and wondered if the radiation that was released from that accident had anything to do with the death of the star fish. I'm not so sure but you might be surprised at what the root cause of these deaths may be.
There is huge area in the Gulf of Mexico that nothing can live there. This is the area where the Mississippi River dumps it's sediment and everything else that's put into our inland rivers system and ends up flowing into the Gulf of Mexico in this area. Anything that we flush down the toilet and or empty in the storm sewers will end up in the Gulf of Mexico eventually. And the area of death is growing.
We need to remember to take better care of this planet as it's the only life boat we have in the universe right now. We have no other place to go so we better stop polluting our home.
Later I helped do an Environmental Impact Analysis for a project that proposed building a dam across a section of that stream to make a reservoir. But that was another class.
