Downwinder Studies
at End
BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- Although some Utah thyroid cancer
patients should be rescreened, a new report concludes, more detailed health
studies on the extent of cancer risk to people living downwind of 1950s nuclear
weapons tests in the Nevada desert are not needed.
The report released Tuesday by the National Academies
of Science upholds earlier conclusions of a feasibility study by the Centers
for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute that wind-borne particles
of radioactive material released during above-ground atomic bomb detonations
40 years ago raised the risk of cancer to surrounding residents only slightly.
Of the huge portion of the American population exposed
to some level of radioactive fallout from the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas
between 1951 and 1962, there have been an estimated 40 million cancer deaths.
Of those, federal researchers estimated only 11,000 could be linked to bomb
test fallout, mostly from exposure to iodine-131, a radionuclide that causes
thyroid cancer.
"The committee believes that although a more detailed
study is technically possible, neither the data nor the consequences appear
to justify it," wrote an independent group of scientists from the National
Research Council who reviewed the unpublished federal study.
For those in Utah and across the inland West who contend
radioactive fallout from the federal nuclear bomb proving ground in Nevada
caused cancers, birth defects and other debilitating diseases in their families,
the latest conclusion was disappointing but not unexpected.
"We've heard these verdicts before that nobody got hurt,
just the same way they used to tell us on the radio after a bomb went off
that there was no danger from the fallout," said Preston Truman of Malad,
Idaho, director of Downwinders, the 25-year-old organization of radiation
fallout survivors. "Well, we bury the dead, they don't. There are still a
few of us around with pitchforks, so this isn't over."
Truman belongs to a select group of people that the
federal government has contended was most at risk for exposure to fallout.
He was born in 1951, the year nuclear tests began, and in what is generally
considered a hot zone of fallout, the town of Enterprise, in Utah's Washington
County.
As a baby, he was diagnosed with a milk allergy so he
was given goat's milk, a feeding regimen that put him at higher risk for
thyroid cancer.
Truman was one of the participants in the 1963 "Utah
Thyroid Disease Study," which found evidence of excess thyroid cancers and
benign tumors in areas close to the Nevada Test Site. The National Research
Council's new report suggests retesting those participants since screening
practices may have been less precise than modern methods. And the committee
said new data on exposure to iodine-131 and thyroid cancer rates gathered
from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in the former Soviet Union
may help extrapolate more accurate thyroid-cancer rates for downwinders.
The University of Utah is redoing the 1963 study and
intends to rescreen the original cohort, or study group.
"The recommended reanalysis of iodine-131 exposure is
unlikely to make large changes in the key results, but it will make the risk
estimates current and hence more credible," said University of Texas professor
emeritus William Schull, chairman of the committee that wrote the report.
Because only 100 fallout monitoring stations were in
operation in the 1950s across the country, the committee determined there
is no use in further national exposure studies as not enough baseline data
can be found to know what areas of the country were hit hardest with dangerous
radionuclides.
One of the key authors of the federal feasibility study
said he appreciated the committee's validation of the work but had hoped
for encouragement to conduct further investigations into the rate of fallout
exposure and cancer risks.
"I would have been more pleased if they had said to
do something more definitive, because I believe there are some additional
data resources that could be brought to bear, although we could not locate
them," said Lynn Anspaugh, a research professor in the Department of Radiology
at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
"It probably wouldn't change the risk significantly,
but we could do better and I would like to see it pursued."
Anspaugh has been searching for old Public Health Service
milk sample inspection reports kept by most states during the atomic testing
era, when radiation levels periodically prompted removal of milk bottles
from grocery store shelves. Although Salt Lake City had an extensive program
of milk sampling in the 1960s, those records have not been found.
"If it hasn't disappeared already, it will soon," said
Anspaugh. "That's one of the reasons why this new report is talking about
preserving all the data now before it is destroyed."
Truman contends the federal government won't go out
of its way to preserve the data or conduct further studies on the likelihood
that people living outside the southwestern United States contracted cancer
from radioactive fallout.
"When you have the entire country splattered with fallout,
where is your control group?" he said. "When you do a study that takes into
account everywhere it went, you are going to find the government is culpable
and must compensate more Americans than just those of us who lived nearby.
"But if the government waits long enough, maybe they
figure there won't be anybody left alive to complain."
csmith@sltrib.com
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