French nuclear tests infected 'almost entire Polynesian population': report

[hunter]

7. "Infected?" That's the wrong word.

Nuclear weapons testing polluted the environment with toxic materials, many of these radioactive.

The word "infected" is used for fungi, bacteria, viruses, etc., that multiply within the organism they infect.

One doesn't, for example, get "infected" by air or water pollution, although both can be deadly, and both might contain pathogens.

Maybe this is a bad translation of the original French.

Nuclear weapons testing was a horrible thing. My wife's father witnessed an atomic bomb test up close. He was one of the human guinea pigs used in U.S.weapons testing. The military wanted to see how soldiers and sailors would fare in an actual nuclear battle. He didn't tell anyone, not even my mother-in-law, until a few years after Congress rescinded the Atomic Veteran “oath-of-secrecy” in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_veteran

Civilian "downwinders" were similarly exposed to toxic materials from nuclear weapons manufacture and testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders