In 1958 dental associations in St. Louis, organized by Dr. Barry Commoner, concerned about increasing fallout from aboveground nuclear tests, independently began collecting baby teeth to ascertain strontium-90 levels since the bomb tests began in 1945. It was soon clear that there had been statistically-significant, geometric increases since 1951. More than 60,000 teeth were collected and, by 1965, peak levels of about 5 pCi/grCa, were reached, indicating a fifty-fold increase since 1951.
All published studies tell a similar story; peak levels were reached in the mid-1960s, when the huge amounts of Sr-90 released in the final massive US/USSR hydrogen bomb tests of 1962 finally rained out by 1964 and 1965.In the 1970s, Sr-90 levels in baby teeth dropped back down to about 1 pCi/grCa, about the same level reached in the US by 1958. Studies published by Denmark and Japan were continued until the early 1980s, suggesting that sometime in the mid-1970s the strontium-90 levels in teeth leveled out, followed by a slight upturn.
However, a current study of some 6,000 German baby teeth collected since 1992 by the German Section of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War--winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize Award--found the trend has changed.
The German Section of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War found a tenfold increase in the teeth of German children born in the period following the arrival of Chernobyl fallout in May of 1986, as compared with children born in 1983.