Re: Please respond to Caldicott's letter

[RADPROJECT <RADPROJECT@aol.com>]

One should not try to respond to every distortion or false statement by any
critic. The best strategy is to take one of the most misrepresented points and
clearly state why the point is false. Having done this, the credibility of a
critic is easily called into question and you can make a general statement
that the rest of the critic's arguments are every bit as flawed.

For example, if the cited claim about environmental plutonium were true the
inventory of fallout plutonium in the environment from nuclear bomb testing
[many tons] would have killed off the entire globe's population due to lung
cancer. Since this has not happened, and environmental Pu could only be
responsible for a minute fraction of present lung cancer rates, the claim
about Pu environmental carcinogenicity is easily understood by the public to
be a lie. Ergo, other claims by the critic  are suspect, and the entire letter
is discredited. 

Stewart Farber, MSPH
Director
Radium Experiment Assessment Project
Voice: (401) 727-4947         E-mail: radproject@aol.com
FAX: (401) 727-2032

PS:
If anyone wants to read some background information on Nasal Radium
Irradiation (NRI), a medical treatment used to shrink tonsils and adenoids by
positioning sealed 50 mg Ra-226 applicators [encased in 0.3 mm Monel so as to
maximize beta dose] through the nose to the opening of the Eustachian tube [
36 min in three 12 min treatments on average] they can access a detailed
review/news article which was recently published in the Baltimore City Paper
on the subject. NRI is now estimated to have been used from 1946 to 1961 [per
a CDC estimiate] on from 571,000 to 2,600,000 children. The practice actually
continued into the 1970s, especially in Maryland. NRI was reviewed as a "human
radiation experiment"  by the President's Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments ( ACHRE ) because of NRI  use on 7,613 WWII Army Air
Force and Navy submariners and 291 children in an experiment conducted at
Johns Hopkins from 1948 to 1953. The radiation dose delivered to the
nasopharynx of subjects was at least 2,000 R, with pituitary doses of 50 to
100 R in young children. The email address for the Nov. 5, 1997 news article
is:

www.citypaper.com/features/featur45.htm


If one has an interest in the ACHRE action on NRI, they can access some
testimony I presented ["Nasal Radium Irradiation & The Advisory Committee on
Human Radiation Experiments -A Failure of Process -- Bad Science/ Bad
Medicine/ Bad Ethics" ] to a Senate Government Affairs Committee Hearing on
Human Radiation Experiments on March 12, 1996 (S. Hrg. 104-588). The testimony
is on the web at:

http://www.brown.edu/Courses/Bio_Community_Health168C/farber.html

This testimony contains a fairly detailed review of the failure of the
President's ACHRE to deal with the issue of NRI due to clear conflicts of
interest by the committee members, especially Dr. Ruth Faden of Johns Hopkins
University and School of Public Health who chaired the Advisory Committee and
voted against medical notice and follow-up of those children treated in a
human radiation experiment conducted by Johns Hopkins on 582 children in the
Baltimore Schools from 1948- 1954. NRI use on these children in Baltimore was
the only one of 4,000 human experiments reviewed which exceeded ACHRE's
arbitrary  criteria for medical notice and follow-up based on excess cancer
mortaility[1 excess cancer death per 1,000 persons in an experiment]. In the
case of NRI use on children, the excess mortality calculated by ACHRE was 8.4
per 1,000 individual excess cancers of the brain, head and neck. Notice and
follow-up was not recommened because ACHRE claimed "most of the risk had
probably already been expressed" (i.e.: the individuals who were calculated to
have died may already have died, so why bother to provide notice) and secondly
a false claim that there was "no recommened screening procedure for cancers of
the brain, head, and neck"  [supposedly, including thyroid cancer]. This is a
fascinating case study of how the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments violated public trust and failed to do what it had been appointed
to do.