Update on the St. Louis cancer cluster.
5 year statute of limitations.
Most cancers take much more time to manifest.
They're screwed again...





Judge throws out most Coldwater Creek cancer claims
[link to www.stltoday.com]

[snip]

A federal judge has dismissed all but one claim in lawsuits filed against the chemical company Mallinckrodt by 29 people who believe their cancers were caused by the radioactive contamination of Coldwater Creek.

The eighth claim filed under a federal law involving injuries caused by exposure to nuclear materials was not dismissed. But Fleissig said lawyers for the residents have until May 10 to show that the injuries occurred no more than five years before the suit was filed, to meet Missouri’s statute of limitation rules.

Coldwater Creek was contaminated by nuclear waste from the production of atomic bomb materials by the Mallinckrodt company in downtown St. Louis. After World War II, radioactive byproducts were dumped at an open storage site by the airport and buried near Coldwater Creek, which borders the waste site to the west. By the 1990s, soil and water samples from the creek showed unsafe radiation levels. The Army Corps of Engineers has nearly completed its cleanup of the airport waste sites and the creek.

Scientists are almost always stumped by investigations into suspected cancer clusters because of the complexity of the disease and the difficulty in measuring exposures to carcinogens. Thousands of potential clusters are reported to health departments in the U.S. each year, but most instances that do turn up high cancer rates are never linked to a specific cause.