Childhood cancer in Connecticut reached a peak in 1964, before plummeting in the latter half of the 1960s. The CNI study ended in the early 1970s, when federal support for the project ceased. Both Figures 1 and 2 support the well-known fact that exposure to toxic agents is most harmful to the developing embryo and fetus, both in humans and in animals. The developing infant is similarly susceptible to cellular and metabolic damage. At ten weeks of development when the fetus is a little over 1.5 inches in length, the enamel organs and dental papillae form.
Some formation begins two weeks earlier.
Fetuses can be harmed by very low dose radiation, first demonstrated in the 1950s when exposure to pelvic X-rays in utero was linked with elevated levels of leukemia and cancer deaths before age ten. U.S. health officials have not monitored radioactivity in humans since 1982. While the last worldwide atmospheric weapons test was detonated in China in 1980, the presence of nuclear power reactors has grown in the past two decades. These individuals were children during the period of greatest Sr-90 deposition. One might presume from this statement that adult Sr-90 levels would rise in the 1980s and 1990s as baby boomers account for increasing proportions of the adult population and as an increasing number of nuclear power plants came on line.