Book inspired movie ‘Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak’
OCEAN CITY — The Baby Tooth Project initiated in 1958 examined how children across the United States were absorbing a radioactive element because of fallout from nuclear testing in Nevada and distant islands in the Pacific.
Ocean City’s Joseph Mangano is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, which took a new look at the initiative that appeared to help spur President John F. Kennedy to sign an international treaty in 1963 to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.
In the late 1950s, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis read an article in the journal “Nature” by federal scientist Herman Kalckar proposing nations do a census on baby teeth to document the buildup in children of strontium-90, a deadly byproduct of nuclear explosions.
The concern was that all of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was propelling radioactive materials miles into the atmosphere, where winds would carry them thousands of miles across the country. They would be brought to Earth by precipitation and enter the food supply, including by cows eating contaminated grass and passing the strontium-90 on through their milk.
Scientists were aware of the radioactive isotope when they were developing the atomic weapons used to end World War II. It is the same created by nuclear reactors.
Mangano said Kalckar made the point it would be easy to collect baby teeth because parents could donate them when they fall out. Strontium-90, Mangano explained, “is like a bull in a china shop” when it enters the body.
When a child absorbs strontium-90, such as by drinking milk or eating vegetables contaminated by radioactive fallout, it follows the same pathway as calcium and seeks out bones and teeth.
Unlike beneficial calcium, which helps in bone health and growth, the unstable particles penetrate into bone marrow and damage blood cells, raising the risk of cancer.
The scientists took their concerns to the Greater St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information. The committee, comprised of scientists and citizens, many of them mothers, voted to begin a tooth study. They initiated the Baby Tooth Project, collecting teeth first in a wide area around St. Louis and then expanding it across the nation.
Over the ensuing 12 to 15 years, they collected 320,000 baby teeth through an extensive series of public outreaches, appealing to schools, libraries, scouting and community groups and government officials, Mangano said.
A 3×5 card was filled out with every tooth collected with information on the tooth and child. Every child who donated was given a little metal pin with a picture of a boy smiling with a gap in his front teeth and the saying, “I gave my tooth to science.”
Mangano, who is in his late 60s, said a lot of people his age remember that.
Although the study stretched into the 1970s, early testing showed that beginning in 1950, when major large-scale, above-ground nuclear testing began, until the early 1960s, average strontium-90 in baby teeth increased 60 times.
An article written by committee member and medical doctor Louis Reiss was published in 1961 and was sent to President Kennedy’s science adviser. Mangano has gotten to know the doctor’s son, Eric Reiss Jr., who told him that as a child he answered his parents’ home phone and heard the voice, “This is John Kennedy. Can I speak to your mother?”
When the president gave a speech in the White House in favor of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the summer of 1963, there were words in the speech that indicated the president knew about the study. Those words were, “What about our children with leukemia in their blood, cancer in their bones and with poison in their lungs?”
“It took a little while to hit me on the head to point out that real heroes of this project was yes, in part the scientists and in part government officials, but really the people, the parents and in most cases the mothers, who took time out to do something good for the world,” Mangano said.
The treaty passed. A lot of credit goes to a letter-writing campaign from people in St. Louis who wanted the testing to stop because strontium-90 was getting into their children’s bodies. There were also ban-the-bomb protests at the time.
“I can just imagine women of the time, pillbox hats and high heels and pushing baby carriage, saying to get strontium-90 out of my child’s milk,” Mangano said.
Articles in journals by researchers showed even after a huge buildup of strontium-90, that after the test ban, there was an immediate plunge. After five years, children born in 1969 had less than half of the strontium-90 in their bodies than those in 1964, Mangano said.
He said his group, the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP), was formed to study the health hazards of exposure to nuclear test fallout and nuclear reactor emissions, which are the same.
They got to know some of the people from the original St. Louis study and got the idea to study the teeth of children living near nuclear reactors.
One day, Mangano said, he got a call from a professor from Washington University saying that while looking for storage space, they came across the boxes of baby teeth in envelopes clipped to those 3×5 cards, including thousands of teeth that were never tested. The teeth were donated to the RPHP.
The project wanted to do a different study, analyzing the health effects from strontium-90 on the body.
Their problem? They had 100,000 teeth.
“Imagine long shoeboxes filled with tiny envelopes with teeth paper-clipped to 3×5 cards. Each box had 200 to 300 of these. We have 300 shoeboxes,” Mangano said. “It is very difficult to do a study. We’re a small group with modest funding and for 15 years did very little with them.”
One study they did was to identify people who had died of cancer by age 50 and compared their baby teeth to others the same age who were alive and had no health problems.
There were only 60 teeth total used in the study, but they found that the cancer group had more than double the strontium-90 in their teeth, Mangano said. They published their findings. (Mangano has published 33 journal articles on radiation impact on health.)
He said the first surprise the group had was the discovery of the teeth from the original study. The second surprise came in 2016 from a friend, a professor at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who referred Mangano to the man’s colleague, a professor of public health at Harvard University, Marc Weisskopf.
Weisskopf got a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health for Harvard and made RPHP a contractor.
In 2020, the first year of the study, the RPHP used its portion of grant money to enter the data from the 3×5 cards into an Excel spreadsheet. They catalogued 100,700 teeth as their first step.
Harvard and the RPHP are working with the information. Harvard is studying early life exposure to heavy metals such as lead and mercury to see if those exposures affected health later in life.
“Our mission is to look at the question: did the bomb fallout that got into the body affect cancer rates later in life?” Mangano said it is a very basic question about the bomb testing: did it harm people?
“We’re quite excited this is going to not just look back into the past and see how the Baby Boomer generation was affected, we’re also collecting teeth from areas near reactors and we’re going to compare who got more strontium-90,” he said. “Was it grandparents who got bomb fallout or grandchildren who got reactor emissions? We’re going to find out.”
Mangano has been executive director of the RPHP since 1989. He lived in New York City for many years before moving to Ocean City. To learn more about his project, go online to radiation.org.
A book Mangano published in 2008, “Radioactive Baby Teeth: The Cancer Link,” inspired an English-language film by a Japanese director Hideaki Ito that is intended for American audiences. It is called “Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak.”
Ito will be in the U.S. in July and August screening the movie. To schedule a screening, email burkeshiho@gmail.com or sachi.com@goldensachi.com
– PHOTOS and STORY by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff