The Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Northwestern Los Angeles was a decades-old testing facility home to rocket tests and nuclear reactors. The site suffered a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959. All these decades later, a new study suggests that people living near this facility report more chronic health problems, though a definitive link has not been fully established.The study, published in Risk Analysis, surveyed 475 residents living within 15 miles of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, whose partial meltdown contaminated the soil and groundwater with radioactive and chemical waste. The researchers found that the closer someone lived to the meltdown, the more likely someone was to have chronic health problems. A 1959 Nuclear Meltdown May Still Be Casting a Shadow Over Nearby Communities18 percent of residents within five miles reported having an autoimmune disorder, compared with four percent among people living 11 to 15 miles away. Metabolic and endocrine disorders showed similar signs, with reported diagnosis is falling from 15 percent close to the facility to two percent farther away.The big asterisk here is that the researchers relied on residents self-reporting their own diagnoses. They didn’t personally check medical records. This methodology means the researchers can identify a pattern, but they can’t firmly establish that contamination caused anyone’s illness. There’s a lot more research needed to find out what’s actually going on, but there seems to be enough already here to raise some eyebrows.This all matters quite a bit nowadays, not just because of the inherent dangers of whatever may still be lingering in the soil and water, but because, with the regular occurrence of wildfires and drought, the danger these contaminants pose takes on a whole new form.The post Residents Closest to a Former Nuclear Meltdown Site Report Higher Rates of Chronic Illness appeared first on VICE.