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RE: Sellafield
One of the most frequently publicized cases of cancers linked to nuclear
technology in the past several years has been that associated with Britain's
Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. But the wheels of justice -
and of medical science - turn slowly, and only in the mid-90s has enough
evidence been gathered to provide an accurate picture of what really
happened, as well as to settle a court case involving two families.
The Sellafield case has attracted so much attention over the past decade
because it concerns an unexplained excess of acute lymphatic leukemia in
young people under 25 years of age. The lawsuit sought compensation based on
the hypothesis that the men's exposure to radiation in the course of their
work led to mutations in their sperm which increased the risk of leukemia in
their children.
Leukemia in children is a fairly rare disease, but it is far from unique
to Sellafield or any other factory area, nuclear or otherwise. About the
only thing known about its epidemiology, from studies of national cancer
registries and especially of its incidence in twins, is that only about 5%
of all cases in Britain are inherited genetically.
Knowing the number of leukemia cases resulting from inherited mutations
in the general population and the number of leukemias at Sellafield, British
cancer researchers have calculated that the genetic mutation rate required
to account for the observed difference would need to be about 2000 times
higher at Sellafield than the normal rate. The problem with that is that
radiation is a very poor mutagen - with noticeable effects requiring
supralethal doses - and one that acts in a very non-specific way, unlike a
number of chemical mutagens.
The cancer researchers concluded that the workers' recorded radiation
doses, which were at most only six times the normal background exposure
rate, could not account for the proposed 2000 times higher mutation rate. In
fact, if their radiation doses had been 2000 times higher than background,
the men would have been killed ten times over. Actually they show no
statistically significant disease rates as their children do. The
researchers underlined the lack of other well-known inherited single-gene
syndromes which one would have expected with the kind of random damage that
radiation induces in the genome, and they referred to a number of studies
that demonstrated a lack of genetic radiation effects. As most important
they cited the lack of any excess of leukemia cases among the children of
the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosion, which
involved much higher radiation doses than those at Sellafield.
Finally, it has been found that no excess of leukemia in young people
exists in all the towns and villages surrounding the one associated with the
Sellafield court case - namely Seascale - despite the fact that 92% of
the births to Sellafield employees occurred in these other places and that
fathers of these children had received 93% of the total (ie. group sum)
preconception radiation dose. If radiation had been responsible for the four
(4) Seascale cases as originally charged, then some 53 excess cases would
have had to have materialized in the other towns. None did, and the court
case against the plant operators was dismissed. The cancer researchers
concluded that some other explanation needs to be sought in this, as well as
in some other cases of leukemia clusters in which nuclear industry plays no
role at all.
The widespread and repeated publicization of the Sellafield case - and
the glaring lack of publicization of its resolution - once again shows
that whenever a culprit is difficult to identify, the media are always eager
to stoke the fire of antinuclear witch hunting. They are not in the business
of dispelling myths, but of perpetuating them.
Jaro
frantaj@aecl.ca
-----Original Message-----
From: Gibbs, S Julian [mailto:s.julian.gibbs@vanderbilt.edu]
Sent: Tuesday August 22, 2000 10:26 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Re: Sellafield
The Gardner study (purporting to show a cluster of
childhood leukemia in offspring of workers at the
West Cumbria nuclear plant in the UK) has been roundly
criticized on a number of grounds.
A few references:
Kinlen et al, Brit Med J 310:763, 1995
Little et al, Health Phys 68:299, 1995
Neel, Genet Epidemiol 11:213, 1994
***********************************************************
S. Julian Gibbs, DDS, PhD Voice: 615-322-1477
Professor, Emeritus FAX: 615-322-1474
Dept. of Radiology & Radiological Sciences
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
209 Oxford House
Nashville TN 37232-4245 Email:j.gibbs@vanderbilt.edu
***********************************************************
"Under democracy each party always devotes its chief energies
to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to
rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
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