From Zuni to Chinle

On call. Checked up on pregnant/laboring women most the day. Worked on my colorectal cancer (CRC) presentation. It's coming along nicely. Also went to a meeting for the docs there. Interesting to see some of the administrative stuff they deal with - being physicians, government employees and part of a reservation all appear to have their won sets of issues.

My call was cut short so I could make it out to Chinle, AZ in time to meet up with the docs of the uranium mining clinic. The drive there was spectacular, Corn Mountain was lit up in my rearview mirror for miles as I drove into the low sun. Noticed a big difference from NM to AZ in just the roads. Right at the boarder there's a town called Witch Well. Or maybe it's just a bar. Kind of hard to tell in the middleofnowheres I've been driving by.

On the way the drive was incredible, I was surrounded by storms. Watching rain move across the horizon but staying dry on my drive. Once I arrived I saw tourists mingling around. A few government vehicles in the hotel parking lot clued me in that I was indeed in the right place. I had dinner with Dr. Z, the head of the clinic. We talked about uranium mining. I had looked at a powerpoint he sent me earlier that week.

About the cause: Uranium was found to be present in the four corners area. The miners, almost all Navajo and Hopi, worked for the government -- who knew well the potential harms (think: Tuskegee). I learned a horrifying story about an Austrian doctor (if I remember correctly) who came to the states, he knew of the dangers of Uranium mining and wanted to see the mines himself. The government not only censored him as soon as they could but they banned him from traveling west of the Mississippi! The diseases seen in the miners are lung related, usually fibrosis and cancer. If lung disease can be confirmed the miners can receive 50,000. If they don't have lung disease they don't get anything but the fear of getting ill.

Uranium is apparently becoming more profitable these days and there's talk of more mining. However they talk of a method of mining that involves extracting uranium with some sort of bicarb solution. The wash is collected and the uranium extracted, the “benign” wash going back into the earth… and the water supply. There's no “proof” that this method infects water because other sites with sick people in the vicinity don't have water samples before mining and thus can't rule out that the water was infected beforehand. Convenient, no?