A six week old fetus is exquisitely sensitive to minutes doses of dioxin. In one experiment on rats, she explains, they exposed them in utero to minute doses of dioxin. When these rats were born and then grew into adulthood, they were re-exposed to dioxin. They got cancer. However, when they exposed adult rats which had not been exposed in utero, they did not get cancer.
Adolescence is another vulnerable time.
We need to think about the growth of female breast buds, she says, and girls possible exposure to X-rays. Steingraber reminds us that radiation can scatter. As we leaned over the machine to laugh at our skeletal feet, we got full body exposure, irradiating our chests. One participant reminded us that the way doctors used to treat scoliosis of the spine was to put adolescents in a full body cast and continually radiate to monitor improvement. Steingraber concludes that what we really need to do is make big changes in regulation.