ABSTRACT
The initial sluggish response of the medical and public health communities, and continuing high-risk behavior enabled AIDS cases in America to soar in the late 1980s and 1990s. The rapid advances in cancer detection and treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Boomers moved into middle age, may tend to mask the true effects of an environmental pollutant on death rates. One type of cancer that may reveal more about radiation's effects on Baby Boomer mortality is breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute study of cancer near nuclear plants also provides incidence data for Baby Boomers reaching their middle years. The report, as everyone now knows, was the first official acknowledgment of the disease known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The disease is now known by many knowledgeable patients and physicians as Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, or CFIDS.
