A dose of reality, continued

[Peter Crane <pgcrane@erols.com>]

I am very happy for Jim Muckerheide and for his daughter that her
experience with thyroid cancer has been, so I gather from his message, a
mild one, and I sincerely hope that all her problems are behind her. 
Likewise, the cases of the American triathlete and the Canadian rower
described in the NPR story are good news -- to the extent that any case
of a young person with cancer can be called good news.  

However, I was disappointed by Jim's response to my suggestion that he
identify for RADSAFERS the scientific studies that he was relying on. 
His answer was that I should look them up for myself and discount those
that are deficient.

Is it really so much to ask, Jim, that you give us a citation for the
following statement in your letter to the Massachusetts Advisory
Committee:

"Even with these high [Chernobyl] doses, primarily to children exposed
from about 5 months before birth to 5 years old, with most of the
remaining cases in children that were below about 10 years old, the
increase in thyroid cancer is small.  The reported factor of 3 to 4
increase is from 1 case in about about 300,000 children, results in 3 or
4 cases in 300,000, or about 1 additional case in 100,000+ children."

It was less than a year ago -- July 24, 1999, to be exact, in a message
entitled "Thyroid Cancer and I-131", that you wrote to RADSAFE the
following:

"It is also important to acknowledge that the rad-effects are shown to
indeed be very much greater to infants from -6 months (fetus) to +5
years.  And are still only about 4 deaths, and only then due to
emergency response and medical treatment failures. But the uncertainty
of how high the dose actually was to these infant thyroids, and related
biological influences, is very great." 

Am I alone in seeing a disparity between the two statements?

I can't help thinking, Jim, that you are missing several points,
including but not limited to the following:

   1.  Childhood thyroid cancer, which is what we are seeing in the
aftermath of Chernobyl, is considerably more serious than cancer that
develops in adulthood.

   2.  Even in the United States, there are 1000 deaths from thyroid
cancer each year.

   3.  Granted that the fatality rate from thyroid cancer is low, the
measure of the whether a disease is worth preventing is not limited to
the probability of its being fatal.

   4.  493 childhood thyroid cancers in Belarus alone (the study in the
American Cancer Society journal was based on that number of cases) is a
whopping number.  My understanding is that in Russia, Belarus, and
Ukraine combined, the total of childhood thyroid cancers now exceeds
2000 cases.  Is it your claim that this represents no more than three or
four times normally expected rates? 

	-- Peter Crane (pgcrane@erols.com)
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