Editing St. George, Utah (section)

===Nuclear contamination===
In the early 1950s, St. George received the brunt of the [[fallout]] of above-ground [[nuclear testing]] at the Yucca Flats/[[Nevada Test Site]] northwest of Las Vegas. Winds routinely carried the fallout of these tests directly through the St. George and southern Utah area. Marked increases in the frequency of cancer in the population, not limited to leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, bone cancer, brain tumors, and gastrointestinal tract cancers, were reported from the mid-1950s until the early 1980s.<ref name="jama1984">{{cite journal|last=Johnson|first=Carl|year=1984|title=Cancer Incidence in an Area of Radioactive Fallout Downwind From the Nevada Test Site|journal=[[Journal of the American Medical Association]]|doi=10.1001/jama.1984.03340260034023|volume=251|issue=2|pages=230–6|pmid=6690781}}</ref><ref>Falk, Jim (1982). ''Global Fission: The Battle Over Nuclear Power'', p. 134.{{ISBN?}}</ref>

In 1980, American popular weekly magazine ''[[People (magazine)|People]]'' reported that from about 220 cast and crew who filmed in a 1956 movie, ''[[The Conqueror (1956 film)#Cancer controversy|The Conqueror]]'', on location near St. George, 91 had come down with cancer, and 50 had died of cancer.<ref name="clar">Gerald H. Clarfield and William M. Wiecek (1984). ''Nuclear America: Military and Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States 1940–1980'', Harper & Row, New York, p. 208.</ref>  Of these, 46 had died of cancer by 1980. Among the cancer deaths were [[John Wayne]], [[Pedro Armendáriz]],  and [[Susan Hayward]], the stars of the film.<ref name="clar" /> However, the lifetime odds of developing cancer for men in the U.S. population are 43% and the odds of dying of cancer are 23% (38 and 19%, respectively, for women).<ref>{{cite web|last1=American Cancer Society|title=Lifetime Risk of Developing or Dying From Cancer|url=http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/lifetime-probability-of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer|access-date=May 19, 2021|archive-date=November 25, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161125234039/http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/lifetime-probability-of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer|url-status=dead}}</ref> This places the cancer mortality rate for the 220 primary cast and crew quite near the expected average.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gasdetection.com/interscan-in-the-news/magazine-articles/movie-conqueror-really-cursed-look-radiation-paranoia/|title=Was The Movie The Conqueror Really Cursed? A Look At Radiation Paranoia|access-date=September 15, 2022}}</ref>

A 1962 [[United States Atomic Energy Commission]] report found children living in St. George at the time of the fallout may have received doses to their thyroids of [[radioiodine]] as high as 120 to 440 rads" (1.2 to 4.4 Gy).<ref name=ieer>Pat Ortmeyer and Arjun Makhijani. ''[[The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]]'', November/December 1997, pages 46-50., via October 31, 2007, retrieval.}</ref>