Uranium, the newest ‘hormone’
By Janet Raloff
From New Orleans, at the e.hormone 2004 conference
The incidence of several cancers is especially high on the Four Corners Navajo Reservation, which straddles the Arizona–New Mexico border. Because the region hosts more than 2,000 abandoned uranium mines, many of which release dust into the air and water, area researchers wondered whether mine pollution might partially explain the high rate of reproductive-organ cancers in teenage Navajo girls—a rate 17 times that of U.S. girls generally.