Want to keep up with the Kardashians? Have a radioactive baby

By Christina Consolo

Thanks to the wonders of the real-time social media age, celebrity watchers the world over have been able to enjoy every second of Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy in excruciating detail. From her obvious disdain for her pregnant body to her sudden enthusiasm for eating her own placenta to maintain her youthfulness, it’s all been put out for the world to see.

But this article isn’t as much about Kim K, as it is the blatant disregard for the health of her baby. Not only on the part of Kim and her family, but even her own now-famous obstetrician that has appeared several times on her reality show.

The amount of flying Kardashian did while pregnant has been glaringly obvious to the radiation researcher. All this flying didn’t even register as a blip with her clueless doctor as we now know, from yesterday’s episode of “Keeping up with the Kardashians: Season 8“. Instead, he just stroked her ego and managed his TV presence, while he should have been concerned with the health of her child in light of a severe stomach infection which occurred during a transatlantic flight, one of many Kim made during her much-publicized pregnancy.

The latest word on the Kardashian/West baby is that it was delivered 5 weeks prematurely  and severely underweight, following the discovery of another massive infection with Kim and was placed in neonatal intensive care.

Despite hundreds of tweets and updates from the family since the birth, the only information being shared is that “It’s a girl” and “It’s a miracle”. Even Larry Hackett, Managing Editor of People Magazine exclaimed somewhat disappointedly during Good Morning America, “It’s been strangely quiet on Planet K”.

Premature birth is nothing new, especially since the meltdowns of 3 nuclear reactors in Japan, in March of 2011. Three nuclear meltdowns that is, which have never been contained. In fact, a peer-reviewed scientific study showed that miscarriages and premature births skyrocketed in the months after 3/11. So did maternal deaths, where both the mother and baby die unexpectedly.

Mainstream media, eager to push the Angelina Jolie elective mastectomy and Kardashian’s weight gain, has neglected this study as well as a more recent one, showing infants on the west coast of North America have suffered negative health effects since the Fukushima meltdowns as well. Considering the companies that own themainstream media also make nuclear reactors, that really comes as no surprise.

But what is a surprise is a huge radioactive fallout cloud, called a “plume” has circled the earth every 40 days since the beginning of the accident. This was reported from yet another peer-reviewed scientific study, this time out of Japan. And this has been going on 2 years.

This new plume is in addition to leftovers from atmospheric testing, depleted uranium (DU) that we have used in Iraq and Afghanistan that has made its way back into our weather systems, and the continuous radioactive emissions that come out of the normal operations of 400+ nuke plants in the northern hemisphere.

But the Fukushima plume has been a game changer, except no one really told us that the game had changed. Unless, of course, you have turned off the reality shows to pay attention and come out of the virtually extinct instinct for one’s own sense of self-preservation.

Many OB/GYNs have long cautioned against exposure of radiation while pregnant because they are smart, informed and they actually care that their patient’s babies turns out okay. Radiation severely disrupts the formation of DNA, which happens at an astronomical rate during the first trimester of pregnancy. Organogenesis, or formation of organs, happens during the second. Brain development and growth happens during the third.

Radiation at any of these stages is very, very bad for the health of the fetus, which is why flying is usually discouraged. The reason being the higher you go into the atmosphere, the more radiation you are exposed to. This can be hundreds of times higher than what you would ‘normally’ get on the ground.

Most of it in the past has been attributed to gamma radiation from the sun, and our star emits heavy doses of it 24/7. Gamma radiation is mostly mitigated by our magnetosphere, a protective bubble around the earth that keeps out the bad stuff. But for several years now, our magnetosphere has been doing some crazy things, like developing cracks.

Our sun has been acting up too, for reasons can’t get explore in depth here. But there are many websites, from NASA and other sun observatories that have documented these anomalies ad nauseam for several years now, for those people who care about the health of our planet and its people, and are interested in the science involved.

Los Angeles residents, like Kim Kardashian and her family, have also been exposed for decades to a pesky problem of uranium in their drinking water, courtesy of the 2 nuclear meltdowns that occurred at the Rocketdyne plant in Simi Valley in 1959 and 1963.

You may remember Michael Landon, who filmed “Little House on the Prairie” for years on the land adjacent to Rocketdyne. He died of pancreatic cancer. Or Patrick Swayze, who lived in Simi Valley. He died of pancreatic cancer that had aggressively metastasized. Or Vince Neil, lead singer of Motley Crue, who sued Rocketdyne when his 4-year-old daughter, Skyler, died from an aggressive stomach cancer. They lived in Chatsworth, right next to the facility, which developers said had been ‘cleaned up’ after the meltdowns, right before they built million-dollar homes on top of it. Even Kim’s father, world-renowned OJ attorney Robert Kardashian, died of esophageal cancer just 8 weeks after learning he had it.

But this added insult of radiation from Fukushima, which circles the globe endlessly and continues to blow out of the 3 radioactive holes in the ground in Japan and across the Pacific, has definitively increased west coast residents’ risk to radiation induced illnesses, the biggest threat being thyroid problems, immune system disorders, sick babies, and eventually cancer.

If you are flying too, you are getting even more. The longer the flight, the higher you go, the more radiation you get. This chart demonstrates the causal effect of radiation to illness. The more you get, the sicker you will be. Period.

But the most vulnerable group are the unborn, babies and little kids. They can be up to 1000 times more susceptible to the effects than an adult. A pregnant woman, with the added strain of carrying a child, already has her health compromised. add a little radiation into the mix and you have a sick mother, prone to immune system problems, giving birth early to a sick underweight baby, who could have countless other health problems down the road.

Which brings us back to the Kardashian baby: would any mother willingly experiment on her unborn child considering the risks involved, if they were known? Hopefully not. Kardashian was probably never told of the dangers.

What is so shocking is that she sought treatment for an illness that occurred during a transatlantic flight in her 6th month, was diagnosed with a massive stomach infection, and her doctor never said, “Hey, maybe you should cut back on the flying a bit?”

So she continued to fly on dozens of transcontinental and transatlantic flights, without a care in the world except whether her feet would fit back into her stilettos after she landed. Her doctor dropped the ball, and in a very big way.

Pregnant women everywhere put their faith wholeheartedly in a system of physicians and specialists that, let’s face it, only make money from people being sick. The sicker you are, the more money they make. And, it is certainly easier to blindly follow a doctor’s advice than to pick up a book once in a while (and actually read it), especially if you are under the impression that they actually care about you.

We have become a nation obsessed with things so unimportant that the health of our children, especially those being born today, will suffer greatly for our inattention. Kardashian’s health may improve, but her baby’s life is just beginning. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, it is no fun being sick, especially if you are a sick little kid.

Luckily, Kim and her famous family will have access to the greatest neonatologists that money can buy, but you can see how that may be problematic for the rest of our new mothers in this world. Maybe following the saga of a celebrity’s sick child will condition the masses to accept this as ”the New Normal”, along with the pros and cons of eating placentas, and how long a woman should reasonably wear stilettos during pregnancy.

That certainly is more exciting to talk about than flying through radioactive fallout, and makes for better “Reality” TV.

For more information on celebrities who have had recent health problems during and after flights, see:

Nuked in the Skies part 1: Kim Kardashian, Lil Wayne, Kelly Osbourn:

Nuked in the Skies part 2: Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Bieber:

Christina Consolo is a former clinical researcher supervisor with NIH credentialing; a former Member-at-Large for the Board of Directors, Ophthalmic Photographers’ Society; A peer reviewer for the Journal of Ophthalmic Photography; She has written, published, and contributed to numerous scientific research in retinal imaging and ophthalmogy for the past 24 years; She is also an award-winning biomedical photographer and maintains several websites to teach people about radiation, mitigation, and other nuclear issues. She is also the host of “Nuked Radio” Tuesdays & Thursdays from 1:00-2:00 pm EST on UCY.TV.