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I'm originally from Cd. Juárez. And the house next to my parents' house had to be demolished and rebuilt because it had been constructed with Cobalt-60 contamin

I'm originally from Cd. Juárez. And the house next to my parents' house had to be demolished and rebuilt because it had been constructed with Cobalt-60 contaminated rebar. Decades later, just in our block, there have been many cases of cancer (1 renal carcinoma -- my mom, 1 testicular cancer, 1 melanoma, 3x breast cancer). Sometimes I wonder if that's the natural incidence or if it is in fact a cancer cluster caused by remnants of Cobalt-60. I'm tempted to go back there with a radiation counter of some sort, inside the houses, but I have no idea if a regular geiger counter would suffice (a neighbor who had a radiation counter for construction already checked it out and found nothing when I was a kid, but I'm not sure if he was using the right equipment or if it was sentitive enough. This was in the 90s, and the counter looked like a car battery with a single needle meter).

542354234235 6y ago
> Decades later, just in our block, there have been many cases of cancer (1 renal carcinoma -- my mom, 1 testicular cancer, 1 melanoma, 3x breast cancer). Sometimes I wonder if that's the natural incidence or if it is in fact a cancer cluster caused by remnants of Cobalt-60. That is such an interesting and scary thing about it. It is really hard, and takes a lot of careful data collection, to figure out how much cancer is "normal" everyday cancer from smoking, genetics, voodoo curses; and how much is actually "extra" cancer from possible radiation exposure. It would be especially difficult on something as small scale as a neighborhood block, since random variation of even one or two extra or fewer people unlucky enough to get “natural” cancer could completely skew an analysis attempt.