Whats the danger from an enlarged thymus?
Gofman: There have been careful studies now of these kids that had the irradiation for enlarged thymuses –which, by the way, is no longer believed to have been a disease that existed in the first place– and they’re having an excess of thyroid cancers, an excess of salivary gland cancers. One hospital in Pittsburgh said “Why should we wait till these children come into the emergency room at night with croup?” And they, for a period of over a year, gave x-rays to every child leaving the nursery… There is this wall that prevents us from relating past experience to the occurence of cancer. The full effects are not known. It’s not just what the average dose was back then, some places were giving horrendous doses. Sometimes they’d get a picture that was too faint. So they’d take another one, with a longer exposure –when the problem was that their developing solution was getting spent. And all they had to do was change the developer. But instead of that they gave the person an extra x-ra
