NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/talk/environm/5338

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Path: sparky!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!olivea!sgigate!odin!ratmandu.esd.sgi.com!dave
From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [3/15]
Summary: part 3 of 15: chapter 4 thru chapter 5
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
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Date: 5 Jan 93 15:53:03 GMT
Sender: [e-mail] (Net News)
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                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      4


                                A Ray of Hope




    BY THE SPRING of 1963, when the article finally appeared in {Science},
    the levels of radioactivity in milk were reaching unprecedented
    heights all over the United States.  Extreme concern was being voiced
    both by scientists and the general public regardless of the repeated
    reassurances by local public health officials and the AEC that no
    danger existed.  The intensified pressure began to penetrate to the
    highest levels of government, and in June 1963 President John F.
    Kennedy announced that this country, the Soviet Union, and Great
    Britain had agreed to negotiate a treaty to end all atmospheric
    testing.  He further stated that he had ordered an end to all such
    testing by the United States.  In July the President delivered an
    address to the nation in which he urged the ratification of the treaty
    by the U.S. Senate.  In this address, he referred to the threat of
    fallout as follows:

             . . . the number of children and grandchildren with cancer
       in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in
       their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in
       comparison with natural health hazards, but this is not a
       natural health hazard--and it is not a statistical issue.  The
       loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one
       baby--who may be born long after we are gone--should be of
       concern to us all.  Our children and grandchildren are not
       merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.

       It appeared that the issues involved in the question of fallout
    hazards were at last receiving widespread public recognition.  In
    Congress, hearings on low-level radiation effects were being held by
    the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and for the first time citizens'
    groups and private scientists with no government affiliations were
    invited to testify on this subject.  In August I received a letter
    from John T. Conway, executive director of the Joint Committee,
    requesting my presence at the hearings.  Leafing through the
    transcript of the first half of the hearings held in June, I found a
    reprint of my {Science} article.  It was followed by a lengthy
    critique prepared by the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine.  On
    examination, the AEC critique proved to be strikingly similar in
    wording and theme to the negative review for {Science}.  It denied
    that any effects from low-level radiation had been proven to exist,
    stating that I had ignored the studies which showed no effects.  The
    AEC critique, however, went further and cited figures showing an
    actual reduction in childhood cancer rates after the heavy atmospheric
    testing in 1957.  But the figures were only for children who were less
    than two years old when they died, a peculiar restriction, since
    Stewart and MacMahon had specifically demonstrated that cancer caused
    by the irradiation of unborn children only showed up *after* the age
    of two.  No figures for older children were given by the AEC.
       The Joint Committee hearings opened on August 20, the same day that
    Dr. Edward Teller testified before the Senate against ratification of
    the Test-Ban Treaty.  Dr. Teller, the renowned nuclear physicist who
    had been instrumental in the development of the hydrogen bomb,
    expressed in his testimony the main arguments advanced by the treaty's
    opponents.  He raised the possibility of future military breakthroughs
    by the Russians, stating his conviction that in the 1961-62 test
    series they had acquired knowledge about missile defense that this
    country didn't have.  "This is the main argument against the test-ban
    treaty," he said.  "It weakens our defense, and as long as we have
    reason to distrust Soviet intentions, the weakness of our defense will
    invite attack. . . .  I came to recognize many years ago that real
    cooperation between Russia and us in the near future is impossible."
    As to the possibility of danger from fallout, Teller flatly stated:
    "From the present levels of worldwide fallout there is no danger.  The
    real danger is that you will frighten mothers from giving milk to
    their babies.  By that, probably much more damage has been done than
    by anything else concerning this matter."  Teller also stated that the
    treaty would endanger the program for the peaceful uses of nuclear
    explosions in the Project Plowshare program.  He expressed his belief
    that such explosions could be carried out in "a very clean way," so
    that fifteen minutes afterward people could walk in the resulting
    crater "without exposing ourselves to more radiation that we have
    taken year in and year out in our laboratories."
       At the same time as Dr. Teller was making this statement, in
    another part of the capital Dr. C. W. Mays of the University of Utah
    was testifying at the Joint Committee hearings about the thyroid doses
    received by children in Utah from one of the AEC's Project Plowshare
    explosions the year before.  As measured by University of Utah
    scientists, the doses ranged from 10 to 60 rads--anywhere from ten to
    a hundred times the government's maximum permissible yearly limit for
    that body organ.
       The second day of the Joint Committee hearings, during which I was
    present, began with the testimony of Dr. Shields Warren, who
    represented the National Academy of Science's Advisory Committee on
    the Biological Effects of Radiation.  Dr. Warren had been the first
    director of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, and as such he
    had been responsible for all of the AEC's early research and planning
    relating to the health effects of fallout.  He was also head of the
    U.S. delegation to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the
    Effects of Radiation.  Dr. Warren began his testimony with a review of
    the effects of radiation on man, animals, and plants.  The lowest dose
    listed on his chart was 0.001 rad, or 1 millirad, and this was
    followed by 0.01 rad, which he indicated as giving "no detectable
    effect."  The next highest dose was 1.0 rad, again with the legend "no
    detectable effect."  Dr. Warren evidently did not accept the evidence
    of Stewart and MacMahon, which indicated that 1.0 rad received during
    pregnancy produced something like a 50 percent increase in the rate of
    childhood leukemia and cancer, clearly a "detectable" effect.
       Nothing very serious appeared on Dr. Warren's chart until he got to
    1000 rads.  At 10 rads the legend was:  "Barely detectable qualitative
    changes in lymphocytes," while at 100 rads the chart indicated only
    "mild acute radiation sickness;  slight diminution in blood cell
    counts.  Possible nausea and vomiting. . . ."  Yet the studies of
    Hiroshima had revealed a doubling or tripling of leukemia deaths among
    the surviving adults exposed to this dose.
       Only at 1000 rads did radiation actually appear lethal:
    "Depression of blood cells and platelets . . . death within twenty
    days."  This was profoundly misleading:  It was common scientific
    knowledge that 50 percent of all individuals exposed to 400 rads to
    the whole body would die within a matter of weeks or months, while for
    700 rads the figure was 95 percent.
       For 10,000 rads, Dr. Warren's chart listed "Immediate
    disorientation and coma.  Death within hours . . ." while "death of
    all living organisms" was reassuringly indicated as not occurring
    until 10,000,000 rads.  In conclusion, Dr. Warren quoted the following
    passage from the United Nations 1962 report on fallout hazards, which
    he had helped to prepare:

       It must be recognized that the human species has, in fact,
       always been exposed to small amounts of radiation from a variety
       of natural sources and that the present additional average
       exposure of mankind from all artificial sources is still smaller
       than that from natural sources.

    This, then, had been the voice of the AEC's Division of Biology and
    Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. delegation to
    the United Nations Scientific Commission.
       When Congressman Melvin Price asked Dr. Warren what effects he
    would expect to observe in the 250,000 children in Utah who might have
    received 4.4 rads to their thyroids, as Dr. Mays had testified the day
    before, he replied:  "I think it would be hard to find any effect, Mr.
    Chairman."  But as Dr. Mays had suggested, if one does not look, one
    is not likely to find such effects, and indeed, no one had conducted
    the necessary studies of the children in Utah, in Albany-Troy, or, for
    that matter, anywhere else in the world.
       The next witness was Dr. E. B. Lewis of the California Institute of
    Technology, whose "single-hit," linear theory of cancer causation
    supplied an explanation for the findings of Stewart and MacMahon.
    This theory had formed the basis of my argument that the cancer-
    causing effects of radiation were cumulative and that doses received
    gradually from fallout would be similar in effect to those received
    all at once from diagnostic X-rays.  Dr. Lewis's latest evidence,
    based on a study of leukemia incidence among radiologists, indicated
    that low doses of radiation delivered over a period of many years
    could indeed lead to an increased incidence of leukemia, a finding
    that further buttressed his original theory.
       There was now only one more witness scheduled to be heard before
    Dr. Brian MacMahon.  This was Dr. Hyman Friedell, professor of
    radiology at Western Reserve University.  The main burden of his
    testimony, as he stated, was to urge radiation protection agencies to
    set their standards on the basis of the linear theory of radiation
    damage, according to which there was no safe threshold of exposure.
       Now Dr. MacMahon took the stand.  He opened his testimony with an
    explanation of why certain other studies had not appeared to confirm
    Dr. Stewart's and his own results:  "Every one of the negative studies
    has been based on small numbers, and in no instance do the results
    differ in a statistically significant degree from the expectation of a
    40 percent increase in cancer risk among exposed children."  Thus, in
    defense of his own work, Dr. MacMahon had effectively answered one of
    the major points in the AEC's critique of my article.  He went on to
    summarize his results as follows:

       I suggest therefore that the existing evidence is overwhelmingly
       indicative of an increase in cancer risk for children
       diagnostically exposed in utero;  that this increase is seen for
       leukemia as well as for a variety of other individual forms of
       cancer;  that the best estimate of this increase is that it is
       about 40 percent in excess of "normal" cancer mortality in the
       United States.

       Turning next to the implications of his findings, he stated:

       It seems to me that if this association is accepted, we must
       consider very seriously the possibility of cancer production by
       low doses of radiation such as encountered in X-ray diagnosis
       and even fallout.

       As to the existence of a possible "threshold," Dr. MacMahon went on
    to say:

       The exposure dose associated with pelvimetry [pelvic X-rays] at
       the time of these studies is not known, but it was probably of
       the order of 2 to 3 rad [for a series of X-rays]--substantially
       below the 50 rad that has frequently been mentioned as a
       possible threshold level.  If a threshold for leukemia induction
       exists, then it must be below 2 rads.  It would be a coincidence
       indeed if a threshold existed just below the dosage level at
       which studies have been undertaken.

       One other major issue remained to be discussed, and that was the
    evidence for an increase in cancer risk with an increase in dose--
    termed the "dose-response" relationship.  To this point, MacMahon now
    addressed himself as follows:

       Furthermore, there is some indication in both Stewart's and our
       own data that a dose-response relationship exists even within
       the low-dose range that is being considered.

       Thus, MacMahon, together with all the other nongovernment
    scientists who testified in this part of the hearings, presented
    evidence in conflict with the AEC's claims for the existence of a safe
    threshold.
       Inevitably, Dr. MacMahon was asked his opinion of the use to which
    I put his data in my {Science} paper.  He summarized his reply as
    follows:  ". . . the argument used by Dr. Sternglass does not convince
    me personally, but, on the other hand, I cannot deny that ultimately
    his point of view may be correct."  He further stated, however, that
    he agreed with all the comments in the AEC critique.  This seemed
    puzzling, since I felt he had just answered the most serious points in
    his own testimony.  It became clear that I would have to amass much
    stronger evidence before my hypothesis could gain the public support
    of many scientists.
       After a brief recess, Dr. Eric Reiss was called to the witness
    stand.  Dr. Reiss was a St. Louis physician and a co-founder, with Dr.
    Barry Commoner, of the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information.
    In his presentation on behalf of the St. Louis group, he concentrated
    on the subject of local fallout incidents resulting from the AEC's
    tests in Nevada.  Referring to the many reports on local fallout
    prepared by the AEC, he pointed out that the general conclusion in all
    these official reports had been that "the test program has been
    carried out without any discernible threat to the safety of the local
    population."
       "In contrast," Dr. Reiss went on to say, "our analysis of the same
    monitoring data published by the AEC shows that as a result of nuclear
    tests at the Nevada Test Site, in the period 1951-62, a number of
    local populations, especially in Nevada, Utah, and Idaho and probably
    other communities scattered throughout the continental United States,
    have been exposed to fallout so intense as to represent a medically
    unacceptable hazard to children who may drink fresh locally produced
    milk."  He explained that the discrepancy between the AEC's
    conclusions and those of the St. Louis group arose out of the fact
    that the AEC only measured the external dose from the fallout in the
    environment, while his group also measured the internal dose from the
    fallout particles concentrated inside the body, as Dr. Lapp had done
    in the case of Troy.
       Dr. Reiss proceeded to present figures indicating that for 10 rads
    to the thyroid approximately one in 2860 children might be expected to
    develop thyroid cancer.  Because of the long latent period for this
    disease, he explained, the damage would not show up for many years.
    Possibly ten to twenty.  He then cited estimated thyroid doses of 3 to
    18 rads for the large population of Salt Lake City, Utah, as a result
    of fallout on May 7, 1952, and 5 to 40 rads for Albany-Troy on April
    26, 1953 (this did not even include the much heavier fallout in June).
    Such hazardous doses, Dr. Reiss pointed out, arose not only from
    atmospheric tests but also from certain underground tests:  "Venting
    [leaking of radioactivity] has been reported for at least seven
    underground nuclear tests," said Dr. Reiss, adding that his group was
    able to calculate, for example, that "fallout from the underground
    `Gnome' shot delivered sufficient fallout to the vicinity of Carlsbad,
    New Mexico, to cause thyroid dose levels of from 7 to 55 rads to
    children."
       And then Dr. Reiss turned to an astonishing aspect of the whole
    problem:  If the dangerous internal doses had been estimated at the
    time, "simple preventive measures could have been taken to avoid
    exposure."  It would only have been necessary to warn the inhabitants
    of the area to avoid drinking fresh milk produced locally until the
    iodine levels died down.  "We know of no instance," said Dr. Reiss, "
    in which such a warning was issued until the summer of 1962, when high
    iodine 131 levels observed in commercial milk supplied in Utah led
    state health officials to divert current milk from the market."  And
    finally, Dr. Reiss noted that correct estimates of internal doses
    should have been possible by as early as 1954 *on the basis of the
    then-available scientific theory*.
       The questioning of Dr. Reiss was nearing its end when John Conway
    asked him why his group had made only theoretical calculations of the
    thyroid doses without benefit of any direct measurements of the iodine
    levels in the milk.  "I am delighted you brought that up," Reiss
    answered, "because it is the nub of the problem.  If measurements were
    available, we would obviously have used them.  The question is, why
    were no measurements made or reported publicly by those who had been
    charged with the protection of our health and safety?"
       That evening the {Washington Post} gave prominent coverage to
    Reiss's testimony, as well as to the testimony given at the Senate's
    test-ban ratification hearings.  At those hearings, Dr. John S.
    Foster, Jr., the new director of the AEC's Livermore Laboratory, where
    the hydrogen bomb had been developed, had offered his opinion on
    fallout hazards:

       You are asking for a quantitative answer which involves the
       understanding of an effect, namely the effect on the human being
       that is so small compared with his [radiation exposure from]
       background that we have not been able to measure it.  One way to
       look at it would be to say that the fallout from all past tests
       affecting man for the next 50 to 100 years would be something
       like the same thing as deciding to live a few hundred feet
       higher up, higher above sea level;  that is what it means.

    Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia then asked Dr. Foster what
    importance should be attached to the public's fears of fallout.  Byrd
    phrased his question as follows:  "If I may pose a hypothetical
    question, are you saying, in essence, that if you were a senator with
    the knowledge that you possess in the scientific field . . . you would
    disregard entirely this factor [public opinion] in your reaching a
    decision?"
       To which Foster replied:  "That is correct, sir, although it would
    be a very difficult position for me to put myself into. . . ."
       The third day of the Joint Committee's low-level radiation hearings
    opened with my testimony.  I reviewed all the evidence regarding low-
    level radiation effects on unborn children, presented my arguments as
    to the probable similarity in effects of X-rays and fallout radiation,
    and gave estimates of the increase in childhood cancer that might be
    expected from nuclear testing.  Then the questioning period began.
       Congressman Craig Hosmer asked me how there could be any evidence
    in Stewart's and MacMahon's studies for a dose-response relationship
    when the radiation dose from hospital X-ray machines was known to
    differ widely from hospital to hospital, due to variations in the
    adjustment and quality of the machines.  Such differences would mean
    that some mothers might have received the same or greater dose from a
    single X-ray as others received from two or even three.  Therefore,
    the finding of Stewart and MacMahon that there was an increase in
    cancer risk with the number of X-rays taken might not indicate a
    dose-response relationship.  I explained that it was also true,
    however, that in the case of any one machine, the mothers who received
    two X-rays from it would definitely have received twice as much
    radiation as those who were X-rayed only once.  Since the ratio of
    single pictures to double or treble pictures taken was generally the
    same for each X-ray machine, there could be no question that, on the
    average, the mothers who received two X-rays had received twice as
    much radiation as those who received only one.
       Congressman Hosmer next asked why one couldn't test the validity of
    the dose-response relationship simply by examining the statistics for
    leukemia in children after the test series in the early 1950s.  I
    pointed out that this was precisely what Lapp, Mays, Reiss, myself,
    and others had urged the government to do without success.
       The next question involved the principal argument used by the AEC
    to minimize the possible effects of fallout.  Congressman Holifield
    asked whether I was aware that testimony had been presented by
    government scientists that fallout from all past testing had raised
    background radiation by only some 10 percent.  Since the typical
    background dose was 100 millirads per year, this seemed to be only 10
    millirads additional radiation, much less than the 200 millirads
    received from a modern pelvic X-ray, or than the dose of 200 to 400
    millirads that I had calculated for the recent test series.
       What the spokesmen for the AEC and the Federal Radiation Council
    had done was to take the total radiation dose from all the bombs
    detonated so far--some 700 millirads--and average it out as if it were
    received uniformly over a seventy-year life span at a rate of 10
    millirads per year.  But in fact, most of the dose comes from the
    short-lived isotopes that predominate in fallout, and is thus
    delivered in the first few months after the tests.  To illustrate
    this, I cited figures published just a few months before by the AEC's
    Brookhaven National Laboratory, located on Long Island, not far from
    New York City.  According to these figures, during the first six
    months of 1963, the average radiation exposure on Long Island had
    risen to 4.7 millirads per week, as compared with a normal background
    rate of only 1.7 millirads per week.  This meant that in only half a
    year the dose received by individuals in this area would be about 122
    millirads as compared with a normal dose of only 44 millirads.  Thus,
    instead of the negligibly small 10 percent increase which the AEC's
    seventy-year averaging procedure would give, the actual exposure to an
    infant in the womb would have been nearly triple the background rate.
    And this dose did not even include the effects of internal
    concentration.  This, then, was the reasoning behind the reassuring
    statements of the world's radiation protection agencies that doses
    from atmospheric testing were negligible compared with all the sources
    of radiation in man's natural environment.
       Congressman Hosmer next raised the point that the greater
    background radiation due to cosmic rays in an area of high altitude
    such as Denver as opposed to that in an area at sea level such as Long
    Island should lead to a higher leukemia rate in Denver.  But in point
    of fact, as I stated, the difference in total background radiation
    between these two areas is actually quite small because most
    background radiation comes from sources other than cosmic rays.
    Cosmic rays contribute only about 30 millirads at sea level, compared
    to 50 millirads from the rocks and soil and 20 millirads from traces
    of natural radioactive substances in our body.  Going to an altitude
    of 5000 feet increases the cosmic ray dose by only 40 percent, or a
    total of 12 millirads.  Since place-to-place differences of 20 or 30
    millirads in the radioactivity of rocks are common, the small
    difference due to altitude is easily masked by this factor alone.
    Furthermore, cosmic rays do not concentrate in critical body organs as
    does fallout.
       Thus, it would be nearly impossible to find differences in leukemia
    rates as a result of altitude differences even as large as those for
    Denver and Long Island, considering that MacMahon had to use a study
    group of some 70,000 exposed children to clearly establish an effect
    from about 1000 millirads of X-rays.  And I added that there are of
    course other factors beside radiation that enter into the likelihood
    of a child developing leukemia, making such a comparative study of the
    effects of slightly different background levels next to impossible.
       Following up this point, Congressman Hosmer suggested that if
    factors other than radiation were involved in the cause of leukemia,
    did this not invalidate MacMahon's study?  To this I replied that, in
    such a study, comparisons are carried out with control groups for whom
    all the other factors are, on the average, nearly the same as for
    those exposed to X-rays, thus essentially eliminating the effect of
    such factors on the outcome.
       After some discussion of the size of the dose from fallout, the
    chairman indicated that the committee's counsel, John Conway, had some
    points he wished to raise.  After a lengthy prelude, Conway led up to
    the fact that the Federation of American Scientists' news release
    based on my paper said that 100 megatons of nuclear fission energy had
    been released in the 1962 test series.  Conway argued that since the
    amount released in 1962 was actually 76 million tons, then my estimate
    of the expected number of leukemia deaths was too high.
       But it was clear from both my original paper in {Science} and my
    written testimony that the figure of 100 megatons applied to the
    entire test series that began in September of 1961 and ended late in
    1962, not just to the amount detonated in 1962 alone.  Thus, the news
    release, which was not even prepared by me, should have said more
    precisely, "1961-62 test series."
       When this became clear, Chairman Price intervened to point out the
    simple nature of the misunderstanding, and when Conway nevertheless
    wanted to pursue the matter further Price thanked me for my testimony
    and called the next witness.
       The debate over the test-ban treaty continued in Congress through
    most of September, and then the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly for
    ratification.
       A highly revealing postscript to the entire test-ban treaty debate
    came to light in December, when the full proceedings of the Joint
    Committee hearings were published.  Inserted in the record was a
    letter from Dr. Harold Knapp, a fallout specialist who had recently
    resigned from the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine.  In his
    letter, Dr. Knapp made reference to a 1957 incident in which a nuclear
    reactor in Windscale, England, had gone out of control and emitted
    tremendous quantities of radioactivity into the atmosphere.  The
    contamination from iodine 131 was so great that the crops and milk for
    hundreds of square miles around had to be seized and dumped.
    According to Dr. Knapp's letter, in 1960, when he was doing fallout
    research for the AEC, he came to the startling conclusion that in Utah
    "depositions of iodine 131 per unit area *at many inhabited ranches
    and communities must on several occasions have exceeded the maximum
    iodine 131 concentrations on pasturage found after the Windscale
    accident*." (Emphasis added.)
       As an example, Knapp cited an incident of relatively heavy fallout
    in the St. George, Utah, area on May 19, 1953.  His calculations
    indicated that 24 hours after the explosion the iodine levels in milk
    must have reached 700,000 to 2,600,000 micromicrocuries per liter.  He
    estimated that the thyroid dose for an infant who drank one liter
    (slightly more than a quart) of this milk each day for the three weeks
    following the test would be anywhere from 120 to 440 rads.
       Knapp wrote a report containing these conclusions in 1960, but the
    AEC did not release his report for publication until August 16, 1963,
    just a few days before the second half of the Joint Committee hearings
    began, by which time it was evident that the independent scientists
    from Utah and St. Louis were going to make public their own similar
    findings.  Thus, during the entire early effort to achieve a test-ban
    treaty, this shocking and vital information was kept from the people
    and political leaders of the world, while hundreds of megatons of
    bombs were exploded by the U.S. and Russia during 1961-62.  And since
    Knapp's report had not even been made public by the AEC and the Joint
    Committee by the time of the first half of the low-level radiation
    hearings in June of 1963, it had still been possible for the AEC to
    mislead Congress and the public until just before the end.  From page
    225 of the proceedings of the June hearings:

       REPRESENTATIVE HOLIFIELD:  And the testimony before this
         committee has been that tolerable permission dose has not
         been reached by the amount of radiation that comes from
         manmade fallout radiation, is that not true?
       DR HARLEY:  Yes, Sir.

       Dr. Harley was John Harley, the former colleague whom Professor
    Clark had telephoned at the time of the Albany-Troy incident.  At that
    time a scientist with the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory in New
    York City, Harley had since become head of the lab, which had been
    responsible for the classified reports on the Troy fallout during the
    spring of 1953.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      5


                        The Evidence Begins to Emerge




    IT WAS NOW an established fact that potentially dangerous radiation
    doses had been received by large numbers of people from fallout.  What
    remained to be established was whether or not these doses had actually
    caused any damage.  No direct statistical evidence had yet been
    gathered by either the AEC or federal and state health agencies, or,
    if it had been gathered, it had not been published.
       This situation was abruptly transformed in March of 1964, when
    another letter by J. H. Lade of the New York State Health Department
    appeared in {Science}.  This letter was written in response to
    repeated prodding by Ralph Lapp, who kept challenging the department
    to make public the actual figures after Lade had claimed in the
    September 1963 issue of {Science} that no increase in childhood
    leukemia had occurred as a result of the 1953 rainout.  The exact
    words used by Lade in making this claim had been:

       The cancer report files of this department reveal no increase in
       the incidence of cancer or leukemia over the past ten years in
       children of the Albany, Troy, and Schenectady areas--who were 15
       years or younger in 1963--as compared with children of this age
       elsewhere in upstate New York.

    Lade's new letter contained the first detailed information on leukemia
    deaths among the children of the area.  This was the data on which he
    had based the above conclusion.
       The data consisted of a table that included all reported fatal
    leukemia cases among children under fifteen years of age in the
    Albany-Troy-Schenectady area between 1952 and 1962, together with the
    years in which these children were born.  Examination of the table
    showed that, beginning in the fourth to fifth years after the 1953
    rainout, the yearly number of reported leukemia cases quadrupled.
    This was strikingly similar to the delay in onset observed in the
    studies of Stewart and MacMahon and among the survivors of Hiroshima
    and Nagasaki.  In the Troy area, after the eighth year, the number of
    cases began to decline once more, as they also did in the two Japanese
    cities.  During the years 1952-55, before any radiation-caused
    leukemia cases would be expected to appear, there were a total of nine
    cases among children under age ten for whom the data was complete.
    During the years of expected peak incidence, 1959-62, there were a
    total of thirty cases.  Statistical estimates demonstrated that the
    chances were less than one in a billion that this increase of twenty-
    one cases could be regarded as purely accidental.
       And when the cases were examined according to the year of birth,
    there was a very noticeable sudden increase in leukemia among the
    children born in 1953 and 1954, the period when the fallout radiation
    would have been strongest.  When grouped in two-year periods, the
    figures in Lade's table for children under ten showed the following:

                    Birth Years              No. of Cases
                    -----------              ------------
                      1943-44                      4
                      1945 46                      5
                      1947-48                      8
                      1949-50                      5
                      1951-52                      6
                      1953-54                     13

       How, then, had it been possible for Lade to claim that there had
    been "no increase in the incidence of cancer or leukemia over the past
    ten years in the children of the Albany, Troy, and Schenectady areas"?
    Upon rereading his exact statement, it became apparent that he had
    used a modifying phrase whose significance would easily escape the
    casual reader.  This phrase was:  "as compared with children of this
    age elsewhere in upstate New York."
       But the "classified" measurements made by the AEC's New York lab
    had shown that the *entire upstate New York area* received heavy
    fallout on April 26, 1953, and again during the next few months.
    Under these circumstances, there would of course be little or no
    *difference* in leukemia rates between Albany-Troy-Schenectady and
    elsewhere in upstate New York.  Although he presented no data, Lade's
    statement clearly implied that in fact there had been similar
    increases in *all* these areas.  (And indeed, later investigations
    revealed that there had been such rises all over New York State
    following three to five years after the onset of Nevada testing.)
       In his 1964 letter, Lade presented a final argument to "rule out
    the fallout as a major factor in the leukemia incidence in that area
    for the 1953 births."  According to his figures, there were also a
    large number of leukemia cases among the children born in 1956.  Thus,
    Lade argued that the sharp rise in leukemia among those born in 1953
    could not have resulted from the fallout, since there was also an
    increased incidence among the children born in 1956, when there
    presumably was no major fallout incident.
       This piece of evidence seemed puzzling, especially since all the
    other data pointed so strongly to fallout.  But then, a few months
    later, new light was thrown on the situation when the news of an
    extremely important study appeared in {The New York Times}.  A group
    of investigators working with Dr. Saxon Graham at the Roswell Park
    Memorial Cancer Research Institute in Buffalo, New York, and at two
    other cancer research institutions, had found that the children of
    parents who had been X-rayed as many as five to fifteen years *before*
    the mothers became pregnant also had a significantly increased
    likelihood of developing leukemia.  This finding suggested that
    radiation could cause a type of *genetic* damage to the sperm cells of
    men and the ovaries of women that would make their children more prone
    to developing this disease.
       In the case of Troy, then, it was indeed possible that such a
    genetic effect of radiation could lead to a greater incidence of
    leukemia among the children born in the years following.
       There was another very important finding of the Roswell study:
    Children who had received multiple exposures from a series of
    diagnostic X-rays to different parts of their bodies had a distinctly
    greater risk of leukemia than those who had only one part X-rayed.
    Fallout, due to the concentration of isotopes in various parts of the
    body, would lead to exactly this type of multiple exposure.  Thus, in
    the Troy area, even children who were born *before* the rainout would
    be expected to show an increased risk of leukemia.
       Independent studies had now demonstrated that radiation could cause
    leukemia in children prior to conception, in the womb, and after
    birth.  What would the Troy data show if the cases were examined
    according to which of these three stages of development the children
    were in when the fallout arrived?  When this was done, a fact of
    utmost significance emerged:  Those children who had been in the womb
    or who were already born at the time of the fallout were, on the
    average, one or two years older at death than the children who had
    been conceived afterward.  This was exactly the same characteristic
    shift toward older age at death that had been observed by both Stewart
    and MacMahon in their studies of children X-rayed while in the womb,
    and it had also been observed in studies of leukemia among infants who
    had received medical X-ray treatment.  It was as if the children of
    Troy had been marked with a sign.  The fact that the children
    conceived after the fallout showed the normal earlier age at death was
    perfectly consistent, for it is generally acknowledged that there is a
    large genetic factor in all normally developing leukemia cases and
    that a significant portion of these cases are caused by genetic damage
    from natural background radiation.  Thus the children whose leukemia
    had been caused by radiation damage to their parents' genes would be
    expected to show the normal age at death.
       None of the data supplied by Lade was therefore inconsistent with
    the hypothesis that the fallout had caused the increase in leukemia in
    the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area.  And this might well be true for
    other types of childhood cancer.  Further investigation was definitely
    indicated.  Since I anticipated difficulty in obtaining more complete
    and up-to-date data from Lade, I again contacted Dr. Russell Morgan,
    chairman of the U.S. Public Health Service's National Advisory
    Committee on Radiation.  After reviewing Lade's data and my
    conclusions, Dr. Morgan suggested that I use his name in writing to
    the New York State Commissioner of Health, Dr. Hollis Ingraham.  In
    July I wrote Dr. Ingraham, asking for further information relating to
    cancer incidence in the Troy area and mentioning Dr. Morgan's concern
    about the data published by Lade.  A few weeks later I received a
    letter from Lade indicating that he felt sufficient data was already
    available in his 1964 {Science} letter.  It appeared that the New York
    State Health Department did not want to see the matter pursued any
    further.






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