Health
A Black man stands on a hill in Hunters Point with the San Francisco skyline in the background.

A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy

11.25.2024
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In the first of two podcast episodes of “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point,” reporter Rebecca Bowe traces the soil contamination plaguing a Navy shipyard back to its origins — 20th century nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific.

Environmental justice advocates, scholars and military officials describe their experiences battling over land redevelopment, and reckoning with the legacy of a radiation laboratory that sometimes used human subjects.

Exposed
a white haired man sits on a couch crying and rubbing his eyes with his fists

Why the Navy Conducted Radiation Experiments on Humans

11.25.2024
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In the second of two podcast episodes of “Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point,” reporter Rebecca Bowe lays out what we know from scattered documents and a few remaining eyewitnesses about a Cold War research program that pushed ethical boundaries in the name of national defense.

Bowe speaks with veterans who describe their experiences as guinea pigs in field decontamination exercises that yielded little useful data, and talks with colleague Chris Roberts about what the surviving record say about tests involving injection and ingestion of radioactive substances.

Environment
A map created by Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai to show where elevated levels of four elements were detected in residents, resulting from a community health biomonitoring survey. Photo courtesy of Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai.

Bayview Residents Sound Alarm Over Potential Dust From Toxic Site

07.10.2020
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San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood has been hit especially hard by COVID-19, and residents sheltering in place in the area have for years faced elevated levels of air pollution from a variety of nearby sources. Recently, advocates have raised concerns about potentially toxic dust they fear is being generated by a nearby construction project.

coronavirus
pa_microbiologist_kerry_pollard.jpg

Bay Area Startups Accelerate California’s COVID-19 Testing Efforts

04.07.2020
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At least two Bay Area startups are scrambling to address California’s testing shortage for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has unleashed a global pandemic and triggered economic freefall.

Oakland-based Renegade.bio, created just four weeks ago, has raced to obtain federal authorization and develop tests, while also formulating a plan to make it easier for people to access the tests. San Francisco-based Carbon Health, founded in 2015, started gearing up to offer COVID-19 testing in February, and created a free online symptom tracker to help more easily and quickly identify those infected with the virus.