By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
A North Dakota health official claims
the government has lost records that could help his study into links bet
ween cancer and fallout from above-ground nuclear tests.
"When we requested the original data,
it had been lost," Dr. Stephen McDonough, chief of North Dakota's Prev
entive Health Section, said this month.
McDonough, a pediatrician, said he is
nearing completion of a 100-page report derived from a yearlong study into
22 types of cancer in North Dakota that might have stemmed from fall out.
The study, conducted at the request
of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., focuses on childhood leukemia, thyroid can
cer and infant mortality rates.
McDonough said the missing information
includes records about fallout detected on film sheets at about half the
100 monitoring sites across the United States. The data were reported daily,
but McDonough was most interested in readings from the 1957 Plumbob series
of above-ground nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest
of Las Vegas.
David Wheeler, a health physicist for
the Department of Energy's Nevada Operations Office in Las Vegas, said
the agency has known since the early 1980s that the records are missing,
and no copies have been found.
"We don't know exactly what happened
to them. All we know is the data is not available now," he said.
"Somewhere those original records got
lost. We don't know if they went to Livermore (Calif.), North Dakota o
r Montana," Wheeler said.
McDonough said records of radioacti
vity deposited in 1958 on alfalfa fields around Mandan, N.D., a dairy reg
ion, also are missing.
Film-sheet readings are important t
o the study because they would establish how much low-level radiation fel
l to Earth before entering the soil and food chain in the northern Great
Plains.
The readings then could be compared
to levels of radioactivity in the milk of cows that grazed on forage gro
wn in soils where radioactive particles fell from clouds that transported
the contamination more than 850 miles from the test site.
"Knowing what I know now, I would n
ot have advised the people at the time to drink the milk," McDonough said.
He said he consulted with a former North
Dakota zoologist, Egbert Pfeiffer, to reconstruct some of the fallout levels.
Pfeiffer was an anatomy professor a
t the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks who was investigating lev
els of strontium-90 in cows' milk around Mandan during the late 1950s and
early 1960s. He said strontium-90 levels were the highest reported in the
world during those years.
Strontium-90, a fallout ingredient that
decays half its radioactivity in 28 years, concentrates in the bones of
people who drink contaminated milk.
Pfeiffer said he was shocked by the
levels of strontium-90 in Mandan milk. "It was approaching a half or mor
e of the maximum permissible level. It kept rising after I left" the project
for another job, he said this month.
"Some of those kids were getting a lot
more radioactivity than the government was admitting," Pfeiffer said, explaining
the government reported the levels as averages that did not r eflect the
high levels of strontium-90 found in Mandan milk.
Energy Department officials in Washington,
D.C., said the agency will conduct an informal, preliminary review of the
North Dakota study.
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