Last week my fianc‚ and I brought our infant son, Erik, to the hospital for a stomach problem.

It seems that the reflux valve in his stomach is not working correctly. This causes Erik excruciating pain whenever he tries to digest his formula.

The hospital staff were concerned that formula might be leaking into his lungs because every time Erik breathed, it sounded like he was inhaling water.

To determine this, they fed him radioactive dye to take pictures of his digestion. One of the elements in this dye is iodine-131.

I discovered this accidentally when I looked at the screen which was used to monitor Erik’s digestion. It had a list of all the ingredients in the radioactive cocktail he was forced to eat.

I immediately became concerned that this procedure was going to harm my son rather than help him.

After all, I have been taught since a very young age that radioactive materials are hazardous to our health. After all, why else would they be contained in specially made containers and stored far beneath the earth?

I also thought I knew that iodine-131 was bad news healthwise. More than likely, you’ve heard iodine-131 mentioned on the news recently.

It is one of the radioactive pieces of fallout that resulted from nuclear testing in the late 1950s to mid 1960s.

Iodine-131 certainly isn’t the worst thing that resulted from these tests. It has a half-life of eight days and is used beneficially for many things healthwise. For example, it is being used on Erik as a safe substitute for x-rays.

But strontium-90 also came from the explosions. It has a half-life of fifty years and is being proven to cause prostate and thyroid cancer.

The conventional belief is that radiation exposure was limited to areas downwind from the test sites in New Mexico and Utah. But a 100,000 page report from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has thrown serious doubt on that widely held belief.

The NCI claims that the radiation from nuclear tests was spread throughout the country by wind and rain, exposing over 160 million people within a short time following the tests. Does this really surprise anybody?

Some of these people (which very likely might include your grandparents or parents) were exposed to more than 16 rads worth of fallout.

Doctors recommend that anyone exposed to ten rads or more be monitored for health defects. Ionizing radiation, such as that formed by strontium-90, breaks up molecules in the body. This break up produces abnormal cells which often cause cancer.

In actuality, the monitoring never happened because the population was never notified.

In fact, most people still don’t know or believe they were exposed. But their ignorance and disbelief still doesn’t erase the fact that babies during that time received up to 160 rads from contaminated milk.

Of course, there will always be those people who believe that their hometowns were unaffected. Perhaps you are one of them.

But the NCI says three Iowa counties received unusually large doses. Other states with very high fallout rates include Minnesota, Illinois and Missouri. So, it is obvious the Midwest was affected dramatically.

It also quickly becomes obvious that humankind has paid a terrible price for nuclear knowledge. The price hasn’t simply been paid in terms of lives (75,000 people were killed when Hiroshima, Japan, was nuked, another 40,000 died in the annihilation of Nagasaki, Japan).

The price is the constant fear that somebody will press the wrong button and usher in Armageddon.

The price is the thousands of people who suffer from cancer every year that was caused by nuclear testing.

The price is the frustration and disbelief we all feel after these recent discoveries.

I realize some aspects of nuclear technology do have benefits for our society. I understand that nuclear emissions can be used as energy long after the world’s supply of fossil fuels is depleted.

But I also understand that this same nuclear technology is slowly poisoning humankind and the planet.

It cannot be good to store such long-lasting poisons within the earth. It also cannot be good for us to be exposed to them for so long unwittingly.

When I look into Erik’s face and see the huge smile that reaches from one ear to the other, I know that a byproduct of nuclear testing was used to make him feel better.

But I also know that hundreds of millions of people suffered before he was well. It makes me feel really guilty about my happiness over his recovery.

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Ben Jones is a sophomore in English from Des Moines.