Should I wipe out saving to pay off credit card? : personalfinance

The United States Military conducted top secret experiments on the citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, for years, exposing them to radioactive compounds, a researcher has claimed.

While it was known that the government sprayed ‘harmless’ zinc cadmium sulfide particles over the general population in St. Louis, Professor Lisa Martino-Taylor, a sociologist at St. Louis Community College, claims that a radioactive additive was also mixed with the compound.

She has accrued detailed descriptions as well as photographs of the spraying which exposed the unwitting public, predominantly in low-income and minority communities, to radioactive particles.

‘The study was secretive for reason. They didn’t have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I’ll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles,’ said Professor Martino-Taylor to KSDK.

Through her research, she found photographs of how the particles were distributed from 1953-1954 and 1963-1965.

In Corpus Christi, the chemical was dropped from airplanes over large swathes of city. In St. Louis, the Army put chemical sprayers on buildings, like schools and public housing projects, and mounted them in station wagons for mobile use.

Despite the extent of the experiment, local politicians were not notified about the content of the testing. The people of St. Louis were told that the Army was testing smoke screens to protect cities from a Russian attack.

‘It was pretty shocking. The level of duplicity and secrecy. Clearly they went to great lengths to deceive people,’ Professor Martino-Taylor said.

In her research, she found that the greatest concentration of spraying in St. Louis was at the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, which was home to 10,000 low income residents. She said that 70 percent of those residents were children under the age of 12.

‘US Radium had this reputation where they had been found legally liable for producing a radioactive powdered paint that killed many young women who painted fluorescent watch tiles,’ said Professor Martino-Taylor.

In her findings, one of the compounds that was sprayed upon the public was called ‘FP2266′, according to the army’s documents, and was manufactured by US Radium. The compound, also known as Radium 226, was the same one that killed and sickened many of the US Radium workers.

The Army has admitted that it added a fluorescent substance to the ‘harmless’ compound, but whether or not the additive was radioactive remains classified.

Professor Martino-Taylor has not been able to find if the Army ever followed up on the long term health of the residents exposed to the compound. In 1972, the government destroyed the Pruitt-Igoe houses.