After long fight, Idaho Downwinders stricken by cancer can get compensation

BOISE, Idaho — Mary Alice Glen was 37 years old when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996. Years earlier, her mother died from ovarian cancer. One of her sisters had breast cancer. A brother had colorectal cancer. In the early 2000s, when Glen was in remission, people in her community in Boise were having recurrences of breast cancer and dying. “I thought, I can’t live with this,” she told The Idaho Statesman. She made the decision to have a mastectomy, even though she was not sick at that time. It was never a question for her. She didn’t want cancer again. She’d long wondered why cancer was so prevalent among her family and friends. Last fall, the illnesses finally started to make sense. She learned she and her family were Downwinders. Between 1951 and 1962, the federal government conducted nuclear tests in Nevada. The radiation affected people up to hundreds of miles away in Idaho and other surrounding states. Most of the tests were underground, but about 100 were atmospheric tests where the “atomic weapons exploded at or above ground level, resulting in radioactive material being released into the atmosphere,” according to a report prepared by the Congressional Research Service.