Fallout Related News Items

[Andy Hull <hull@mail.sep.bnl.gov>]

As I was preparing this, Mike Grissom's message on the same topic appeared.
However, this may add to it.

Tuesday's ((/30) New York Times contained a by lined article by Matt Wald
entitled "U.S. Alerted Photo Film Makers, Not Public, About Bomb Fallout".
The lead states that "Through most of the 1950's, while the Government
reassured the public that there was no health threat form atmospheric
nuclear tests, the Atomic Energy Commission regularly warned the Eastman
Kodak Company and other film manufacturers about fallout that could damage
their products, according to a review of Government literature by a private
watchdog group here."  The article goes on to state that the watchdog group
was the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit
organization in Takoma Prk,Md., that specializes in nuclear weapons issues.
Senator Tom Harkkin (IA) commented that "It really is odd that the
Government would warn Kodak about its film but it wouldn't warn the public
about the milk it was drinking." Harkin said that part of his thyroid had
been removed 17 years ago and that his brother had died of thyroid cancer
last year. 

Today's (10/2) contains another article by Wald entitled "Cancer Study on
50's Bomb Tests is Released."  It refers to the release by the National
Cancer Institute of information from a study of radiation doses from atomic
bomb tests that "was long,long awaited and mostly inconclusive: 115,000
pages produced over 14 years that predict an increase in thyroid cancer of 2
percent to 20 percent above normal."  At a hearing by an Senate
Appropriations subcommittee,
NCI Director, Dr. R>ichard Klausner, indicated that the study had been
released on the Institute's World Wide Web site. He was criticized because
the study failed to offer useful information to "millions of Americans who
had been exposed as children nearly all over the country to fallout from 90
atmospheric tests at the Nevada Test Site."  According to the article, Dr.
Klausner testified that "most knowledge about how much radiation it takes to
increase the cancer rate are for doses to delivered to adults through the
skin (external radiation), not from radioactive material absorbed into the
bodies of children.  
My comment on this here is that some useful information may be forthcoming
from the NCI-NRC-DOE jointly sponsored cooperative study with Ukraine,
Belarus and Russian Federation (See HPS Newsletter, November 1992). At the
1996 EC/IAEA/WHO sponsored International Conference, One Decade After
Chernobyl, in Session 2, "Effects on the Thyroid in Populations Exposed to
Radiation as a Result of the Chernobyl Accident", the incidence in young
children at the time of the accident, was  reported to be as much as 10x or
greater than that expected from external radiation derived dose effect
coefficients.

Andy Hull
SEP-BNL
Upton, N.Y. 11973
Ph. 516-344-4210
Fax 516-344-4210