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RE: ARTICLE: Fallout likely caused 15,000 deaths



Title: RE: ARTICLE: Fallout likely caused 15,000 deaths

Thanks John,

But I notice that the text you copied in your post is missing the first couple of paragraphs of that USA TODAY article.....

....I pasted the missing text in below.

The interesting part is that bit about "an unreleased federal study.....coupled with findings from previous government investigations....."

....I wonder whether those "findings from previous government investigations" include the ones by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which conducted the nine-year, $18 million study for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and which found no link between offsite releases of radioactive iodine and increased thyroid disease among nearly 3,500 people born near Hanford between 1940 and 1946. (seems to me those people in Hanford would also have been down-wind from the Nevada bomb-tests, not just the Pu-production reactors & processing plants....)

Anybody know what's going on here ???

Jaro


=============================

Fallout likely caused 15,000 deaths

By Peter Eisler, USA TODAY

Study withheld because of 'internal reviews' 
 
WASHINGTON - Radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests across the globe probably caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951, according to data from an unreleased federal study. The study, coupled with findings from previous government investigations, suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers - and possibly many more - also can be tied to fallout from aboveground weapons tests. The study shows that far more fallout than previously known reached the USA from nuclear tests in the former Soviet Union and on several Pacific islands used for U.S. and British exercises. It also finds that fallout from scores of U.S. trials at the Nevada Test Site spread substantial amounts of radioactivity across broad swaths of the country. When fallout from all tests, domestic and foreign, is taken together, no U.S. resident born after 1951 escaped exposure, the study says.

The study is the government's first effort to assess the nationwide effects of all forms of radiation from the hundreds of aboveground nuclear blasts detonated worldwide before such testing was banned in 1963. The cancer estimates add a new human toll to the Cold War and raise profound public policy questions, including whether the government should do cancer screenings in high-fallout areas. 


USA TODAY obtained portions of the study, which was
supposed to be finished more than a year ago.

"There should be no more waiting," says Sen. Tom
Harkin, D-Iowa, who pushed the Department of Health
and Human Services to conduct the study in 1998.
"People are still waiting for real communication on
their exposure risks and steps they can take."

The study's estimates of radiation dispersal are
based on complex computer analyses of weather
patterns, population trends and other data that can
help gauge public exposure to fallout from
aboveground nuclear tests.

The cancer figures are a general nationwide
estimate - there is no way to link specific cases
to fallout. The study does not assess cancer risks
in other countries.

The data show that global fallout blanketed much of
the USA, with heavy pockets in Iowa, Tennessee,
California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Fallout
from the Nevada tests settled more in the mountain
and Midwest states, including Utah, Idaho,
Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri.

The study measures exposure to an array of fallout
elements based on county of residence, birth date
and factors such as consumption of foods that
absorb fallout.

It concludes that about 22,000 cancers, half of
them fatal, probably occurred from external
exposure to radioactive fallout. Those could
include everything from melanoma to breast cancer.

The study attributes thousands of additional
cancers to internal radiation exposure, such as
inhalation or eating tainted food. Those cancers
include at least 550 fatal leukemias and about
2,500 thyroid cancer deaths.

Nuclear weapons powers "owe the world a real
accounting of what they did to its health," says
Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research. "The U.S. has been the only
honest country so far."

To learn more, visit http://www.usatoday.com/

Comments or concerns?  Please e-mail us at
mailto:emailnewsletters@usatoday.com
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