Re: Hopkins NRI Research Results/Coverup- SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION

[RADPROJECT@aol.com]

RE: Nasal Radium Irradiation [NRI]

In a message dated 2/4/99 4:06:26 PM Eastern Standard Time, Holloway3@aol.com
writes:

<< >>>>Also when the degree was awarded and I requested a copy of the thesis
in
 Oct. 1998, the Hopkins School of Public Health, and the secretary to Dr.
 Matanoski's
 office told me that theses were available to "outsiders" even after a degree
 had been awarded.<<<
 
 Gradually the details are emerging.  I think that you have left out a word in
 the above.  Based on your previous posts, you probably meant that the
 secretary told you that the theses were not available to "outsiders" even
 after a degree has been awarded.  >>

After answering essentially the same question from numerous posters, on a
least six occassions over the past three days, including more than I care to
count from Mr. Holloway,   I readily admit my error and agree that  the word
"not" should have been inserted into the above sentence so as to read:

 "the secretary to Dr.  Matanoski's office told me that theses were not
available to "outsiders" even after a degree  had been awarded."

Mr. Holloway astutely picked up on this since I had made the same comment on
multiple earlier posts to radsafe and private posts to him about the exact
same point, since he and several others overlooked earlier posts on the
subject. 
 
As Mr. Holloway suggested, I certainly did not take the claim by the office
manager for Dr. Matanoski at face value in Oct. 1998 that a published and
accepted Ph.D. Thesis at the Hopkins School of Public Health was unavailable
to outsiders. As I wrote in several earlier posts to radsafe, I obtained a
copy of the supposedly "unavailable to outsiders" Yeh thesis from UMI thesis
service after making a few inquiries.

As I also reviewed in some detail previously, but Mr Holloway so diligently
ignores, my suggesting that Hopkins is engaged in a coverup of research
results is based less on their simple obstacles placed in my path regarding
obtaining a copy of the Yeh thesis in Oct. 1998 [sixteen months after if was
submitted to the School of Public Health and after the Ph.D. had been awarded
to Dr. Yeh], but in the repeated written statements to many reporters and
members of the public by numerous Hopkins' official spokespersons denying any
risk of harm from Nasal Radium Irradiation.


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON SUPPRESSION OF NRI INFORMATION AND PROPER FOLLOW-UP 

I would also like to refer parties wishing more background on the suppression
of information by Hopkins' representatives, and other entities related to NRI
to read my testimony to the US Senate Government Affairs Committee Hearing on
Human Radiation Experiments in March 1996 about the Advisory Committee on
Human Radiation Experiments' [ACHRE] handling of the health risk from NRI in
children treated in an experiment conducted by Johns Hopkins. A link to this
testimony ["The ACHRE and Nasal Radium Irradiation - A Failure of Process"]
can be found on the REAP website at the bottom of the page. ACHRE reviewed NRI
use on 6,881 WW.II military personnel, and  582 third graders in Baltimore in
a human radiation experiment conducted by  Johns Hopkins from 1948 - 1953,
after the REAP initiative forced ACHRE to consider the issue in March 1995. 

The ACHRE judged NRI as being the only experiment out of 4,000 reviewed to
exceed the committee's arbitrary threshhold for medical notice and follow-up [
1 death from cancer per 1,000 individuals treated, expressed over a lifetime]
for the case where treated subjects were still alive. The risk from NRI use on
children was calculated by ACHRE consultants as being 8.4 deaths from cancer
of the brain, head, and neck per 1,000 children treated expressed over a
lifetime of the test subjects.

Nevertheless, ACHRE recommended  in its Oct. 1995 report to the President that
there was no reason to notify the children in Baltimore treated by Johns
Hopkins in the experiment conducted by Hopkins because as they so dryly put
it:
 "most of the risk has probably already been expressed". 

In other words,  ACHRE claimed those individuals treated with NRI who had
already died of cancer, their surviving family members, and other treated
subjects, deserved no medical  notice and no follow-up!

ACHRE never justified [or footnoted a citation] this strang claim. The
determination that most of the excess cancer  risk had been "expressed"  and
no notice was warranted was made according to the ACHRE committee,  after a
13-1 vote led by the ACHRE Chairperson Dr. Ruth Faden, a bioethicist on the
faculty at the Johns Hopkins School. The one person voting for medical notice
and followup of the NRI human experimental cohorts evaluated by ACHRE was Dr.
Eli Glatstein, then head of the Radiation Oncology Dept. at the Univ. of
Dallas, Southwestern Medical Center. Dr.  Glatstein had served earlier as
Chief of Staff for Radiation Oncology at the NIH/NCI in the 1980s. He was by
far was the most senior radiation treatment specialist on the ACHRE Committee.

Dr. Glatstein  told me he voted in favor of medical notice and follow-up for
both the children in Baltimore treated by Hopkins, and the NRI treated vets in
WW.II experiments,  but was voted against by every other members of the ACHRE
Committee in their drafting their final recommendations to President Clinton.
When I asked Dr. Glatstein why his opinion as the senior radiation specialist
on the panel was so completely outvoted, he told me:

"The committee could not bring itself to notify this many individuals because
it was not acceptable in today's political environment."  
--[personal communciation Eli Glatstein to Stewart Farber, Sept. 1995]. 

I followed up the above question about the skewed vote against his position,
by asking Dr. Glatstein why he did not choose to file some type of a minority
statement in the ACHRE Final Report, noting his desire to see medical notice
and follow-up for about 8,000 experimentally treated WW.II submariners,
aviators, and children treated at Hopkins from 1948 to 1953. Dr. Glatstein
commented that:

"I was appointed by the President to serve on the Advisory Committee [on Human
Radiation Experiments] and it's not considered polite to make waves."

Accordingly, the most senior radiation specialist member of the ACHRE
committee,  has admitted that the no notice and no medical follow-up of  both
veterans and children treated in several Johns Hopkins organized military
experiments was based on political factors. Science, medicine, or ethics,
should have been the basis for the decision by  the ACHRE but such was clearly
not the case.

Dr. Faden, since she is supposedly a world-renowned bioethicist, serving on
the Advisory Committee on Human Rad Experiments as Chairperson, should have at
least recused herself from voting on the issue of medical notice and follow-up
in any Johns Hopkins' human radiation experiment. Instead she voted against
any such notice and follow-up in the NRI case, based on arguments that were
medically, scientifically, and ethically "challenged".

Now that the Yeh, 1997 thesis research at Hopkins has been completed and the
thesis accepted for Dr. Yeh's Ph.D., it's clear that excess brain tumors
[Excess RR of 30.9 per Yeh] and head and neck cancers are continuing in the
NRI treated population right up to the present, along with salivary gland
cancers, and thyroid tumors. The failure of Hopkins to be honest with the
public about the health risks of NRI continues.

In March 1998 [after the Yeh, 1997 thesis was submitted and accepted], Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health and Hospitals actively opposed and lobbied
against a Maryland State Bill [Senate Bill 760 - See REAP website for link to
proposed bill] that would have established a task force to study the effects
of nasal radium on the people of Maryland. Hopkins misrepresented basic facts
of the history of the development of NRI claiming in letters to a Maryland
Committee Chairperson that the NRI treatment was not pioneered at Johns
Hopkins, as indeed it was, but by the Germans during WW.II. The bill to
establish this Maryland task force passed the Senate by a vote of 46-0.
However, heavy lobbying against the bill by Johns Hopkins kept the bill
bottled up in a House Committee so that it never came to a vote on the floor
of the house.

The Yeh, 1997 thesis results at the Hopkins School of Public Health were
submitted in June 1997 to the Hopkins School of Public Health as a completed
thesis and a Ph.D. subsequently awarded. On March 18, 1998, Jane Stanek,
Senior Director, Governmental Relations for Johns Hopkins Health System wrote
to a Maryland Senate Committee considering Senate Bill 760 ["Long Term
Consequences of Nasal Radium Irradiation Procedures"] opposing the proposed
bill and claimed without citations that there were: 

"...... several inconclusive study results regarding the adverse long-term
effects of this therapy..."

The historical record documents that Johns Hopkins physicians developed the
NRI treatment, proposed the WW.II experiments on submariners and aviators to
the Secretary of War, and developed the Monel metal nasal radium irradiator
which became the standard device used for NRI treatments across the world
after WW. II. After WW.II, Hopkins became a major factor in popularizing the
use of NRI across the nation.

In Maryland because of the influence of Johns Hopkins, NRI use continued into
the 1970s, long after it faded in other parts of the country. 

When the NRI issue received extensive news coverage in Maryland in late 1997
due to efforts by REAP to address the issue, REAP received about 1,000 calls
from Maryland from people who were treated with NRI there as children. More
than 100 individuals out of the 1,000 callers from Maryland were treated in
the 1970s! Maryland clearly has the highest estimated per capita use of NRI in
the nation.

However, Johns Hopkins is claiming that there is no need for medical notice
and follow up to the population at risk. In making this claim, Hopkins
ignores: 1) Their own in-house Ph.D.  research by Yeh, 1997; 2) The Sandler,
1978 Ph.D. thesis at Hopkins; and 3) The adverse health effects documented in
the much larger study by Verduijn, 1996 [see REAP website for full citations,
or e-mail me] completed in the Netherlands, which showed a statistically
significant doubling of overall cancer incidence in NRI treated children at
radium doses 3.5 times lower on average, than in the US.

The actions by Hopkins on this matter should be carefully examined as a rather
crude example of agenda science in action. These actions, by an institution
that claims to be one of, if not the most, prestigious public health
institution in the nation, are disgraceful and should be repudiated by any
responsible radiation protection professional.

I think many actions and failures to act by Johns Hopkins on the matter of
health risks from NRI must be examined and called into question. This issue is
too important to the health screening needs of too many people vs. the growing
body of evidence of harm from NRI, to let future actions and needs be obscured
by unsupported and self-serving statements by one or more institutions, or
government agencies.

Regards and thanks to those who bother to read these posts on this important
issue.

Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
Director - Radium Experiment Assessment Project [REAP]
Consulting Scientist
Public Health Sciences
19 Stuart St.
Pawtucket, RI 02860

Phone/FAX: (401) 727-4947  E-mail: radproject@usa.net
            Web address: http://www.delphi.com/carsreap


The Radium Experiment Assessment Project [REAP] is a project 
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