The National Cancer Institute will come to New Mexico this spring to investigate how much radiation people were exposed to after the Trinity test in the southern part of the state nearly 70 years ago.
The CDC studied health hazards in the New Mexico and said state residents consumed radiation via water, milk, meat and produce grown here after July 16, 1945, when the U.S. Army detonated a nuclear weapon for the first time.
Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders’ Consortium grew up about 40 miles from where the bomb went off. “People living in those towns in and around the Trinity site were basically unknowing, unwilling, uncompensated, innocent participants in the world’s largest science project,” she said.
Cordova is a cancer survivor and says she has witnessed high rates of cancer in that region firsthand. She says people in the towns neighboring the Trinity site often don’t have health insurance and have a difficult time taking care of themselves when they get sick.
The Los Alamos Historical Society is sponsoring a tour of the Trinity testing site on April 5.