Excerpted from The New York Times, March 1, 2002, by James Glanz,

"In a preliminary study that takes into account not only nuclear tests in Nevada but also nearly all American and Soviet nuclear tests conducted overseas until they were banned in 1963, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that virtually every person who has lived in the United States since 1951 has been exposed to radioactive fallout."

"These new findings expand on those from five years ago by the National Cancer Institute that showed that people living in a long, plume-shaped region stretching from Idaho and Montana to the Mississippi River and beyond had a slightly higher risk of developing thyroid cancer because of the Nevada tests."

"The new study, which was completed in August 2001 and was first revealed yesterday in USA Today, suggests that for all Americans born after 1951 "all organs and tissues of the body have received some radiation exposure." The study says in highly guarded terms that the global fallout could eventually be responsible for more than 11,000 cancer deaths in the United States."

The Soviet Union and the United States conducted more than 400 above-ground, or atmospheric, tests of nuclear weapons from 1951 to 1963.

"Such tests release radioactive iodine, which decays away in a matter of days, as well as longer-lived isotopes like radioactive cesium and strontium, which take many decades to disappear."

A study by the Centers for Disease Control also looked "at exposures to the long-lived radioactive elements, which can be carried thousands of miles, potentially causing leukemia, breast cancer, liver cancer and other types of cancer. The study estimated the exposure patterns by taking into account the winds after tests, the amount of fallout created in each type of explosion and the rates at which different kinds of radioactive particles fall from the sky."