Editorial in "The Ecologist"

[Aaron Oakley <aoakley@receptor.pharm.uwa.edu.au>]

As part of my neverending effort to examine the claims
of the anti-nuclear-industry, I once again invite RADSAFERS
to examine the following item from "The Ecologists":

Thank you!




8<-----------------------------------------------------------------



Richard Doll Falls into Plutonium Trap
By Richard Bramhall

Professor Sir Richard Doll is well known for using his considerable
reputation as an epidemiologist to promote entrenched industrial and
political interests. This August, he made headlines with an intervention
on the issue of Seascale, the settlement next to Sellafield, where
children contract leukaemia at about ten times the average national rate. 

The Seascale leukaemia excess is no chance fluctuation. It has persisted
from the mid-1950s, and its significance is now undisputed. Such phenomena
(and there are many others) are an embarrassment to the nuclear industry
because they undermine the official view of radiation hazards, according
to which, radiation doses from routine emissions are 'too low' to account
for the enhanced rates of disease. And if the official version of
radiation biology is wrong, the whole nuclear house of cards comes
tumbling down. 

In order to retain credibility, the nuclear industry needs to find another
explanation for the leukaemia. Professor Leo Kinlen thinks he has found
one. Kinlen's hypothesis is that leukaemia is caused by a 'virus', and
that its awkward tendency to cluster near nuclear sites is due to migrant
workers transmitting the virus to isolated rural communities to whom it is
new and who therefore have no natural immunity. Doll, supports Kinlen's
'population mixing' idea. He argues that:

"[although] Kinlen's hypothesis awaits laboratory proof . . . meanwhile it
should, I suggest, be accepted as a reasonable explanation of the Seascale
findings."

These words are from Doll's keynote address to an international conference
on the health effects of low doses of radiation in 1997. In the same
address, he supported the National Radiological Protection Board's widely
criticised view of radiation hazard. As a direct result, this summer's
message in the national news media was (to quote The Independent' s front
page) "Found: the cause of leukaemia". But, as the text revealed, no
'cause' had been found at all. The only new element was a study in which
Heather Dickinson and Louise Parker of the Children's Cancer Unit at
Newcastle University had used a computer programme to quantify rates of
population mixing and to correlate them with the incidence of some
childhood leukaemias. This model, in fact, predicted only about half of
the cases found, and revealed that risks were highest among the children
of incomers - not the locals who, according to Kinlen's original
hypothesis, should have been most at risk.

Undeterred, Doll wrote a foreword to Dickinson and Parker's paper as it
appeared in the British Journal of Cancer. After a lengthy attack on the
notion that leukaemia was due to radiation, he plumped for the 'virus',
concluding again that:
" . . . the time may now have come when Kinlen's hypothesis ... can be
regarded as established."

His assurance was met by a chorus of raspberries from independent
researchers and campaigners. The Newbury Leukaemia Study Group highlighted
Dickinson and Parker's caveats that population mixing seems to be just one
cause, not the only one, and that "other factors cannot be excluded".
Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment pointed out that "No
leukaemias were recorded until several years after the start of military
plutonium operations in West Cumbria in the early 1950s, despite the
significant influx of almost 8,000 construction workers in the 1940s."
CORE also detailed BNFL's funding links with Newcastle University and with
the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, of which Doll was a Director, and added
that some small Cumbrian villages close to the Irish Sea and where there
has been little or no 'population mixing', have significantly high rates
of childhood leukaemia.

The Irish Sea is heavily contaminated with particles of plutonium and
uranium which migrate inland and are retained in human lymph-nodes after
inhalation . The lymphatic system is recognised as a critical organ for
leukaemogenesis, and post-mortem analysis of nuclear workers and members
of the Cumbrian public has shown extremely high concentrations of
plutonium in tracheo-bronchial lymph-nodes. But Doll is uninterested in
such evidence. Expounding the idea that radiation doses to the Seascale
leukaemia victims were "too small" to cause the disease, his editorial
claims:

" . . . measurements of Plutonium and Cs-137 in the bodies of exposed
people . . . showed that the models that had been used to estimate the
doses people received had, for the most part, over-estimated them."

But examination of this paper and earlier published versions5 of the same
research shows that the embarrassing tracheo-bronchial lymph-node data has
been cut out. The crucial evidence contradicting the 'virus' theory is
nowhere to be seen. Doll has apparently not done his research. If he had,
he would know that the 'virus' theory is an outrageous cover-up of the
truth. 


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