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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Children Hardest Hit By Bomb Fallout Exposure To Radioactive Iodine May Increase Risk Of Thyroid Cancer In West

Babies and young children in the West got the largest radiation doses of 160 million Americans exposed to fallout from Cold War atomic bomb tests, the National Cancer Institute said Friday.

While the majority of children in the nation probably weren’t harmed, children in the high-fallout areas of the West “may well have an increased risk of thyroid cancer,” the institute said.

After two days of national publicity and a barrage of questions about its long-sequestered study, the institute released only a few details about the Western “hot spots.”

They include still-undisclosed areas of Montana and Idaho, The Spokesman-Review reported Thursday in a copyright story.

States in the West “to the north and east” of the Nevada Test Site in southern Nevada had the highest exposures to radioactive Iodine 131, averaging five to 16 rad, the NCI said.

Children aged 3 months to 5 years got a dose 10 times that amount - up to 160 rad, the institute said.

The tiny thyroid gland of a growing child is considered the most vulnerable of all organs to radiation damage. A 10-rad dose has been shown to damage a child’s thyroid, according to a 1995 paper by Elaine Ron of the National Cancer Institute’s Epidemiology and Biostatistics Program.

In the fallout study, the average national exposure to adults was 2 rad - still far higher than the approximately 0.1 rad people get from natural sources of radiation each year.

The public will have to wait until September for a summary of the 100,000-page study, 14 years in the making, and until later in the year for the county-by-county breakdown of doses, the institute said.

Meanwhile, a public health official disputes a cancer institute scientist’s assessment of fallout hazards.

Bruce Wachholz, a former Atomic Energy Commission biologist and director of the NCI’s Radiation Effects Division, said Thursday in an interview that the connection between Iodine 131 and thyroid cancer is “suggestive but inconclusive.”

That’s no excuse not to act to protect public health by screening people for thyroid disease, said Bob Spengler, director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Control’s Division of Health Studies.

The ATSDR is a federal agency that evaluates risk to people living around Superfund sites, including Hanford and North Idaho’s Silver Valley.

While there’s no “smoking gun and bullet” linking Iodine 131 and thyroid cancer, “we are seeing a reasonable association,” Spengler said.

Because thyroid disease takes decades to develop, it’s important to warn people exposed as children, he said.

Public health agencies can’t afford to wait years before epidemiologists write the final chapter of the long and contentious argument over fallout, Spengler said.

He was attending a San Francisco meeting of his agency’s Hanford Health Effects Subcommittee, where the fallout study was being discussed.

Spengler is leading an effort to get $4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s 1998 budget to start a program of medical checkups for 14,000 Hanford downwinders exposed as children and teenagers to Iodine 131 from Hanford’s plutonium separation plants.

The program’s total cost: about $750 per person for biannual medical checkups to screen for thyroid disease.

Because thyroid disease takes decades to develop, it’s important to screen people exposed as children, Spengler said.

A Hanford downwinder attending the San Francisco meeting said she’s angry with the cancer institute’s delay in releasing its massive report.

“It’s outrageous this report wasn’t released earlier,” said Trisha Pritikin, a Berkeley lawyer and member of the Hanford health effects committee.

Pritikin said her father, Hanford engineer Perry Thompson, died 1-1/2 years ago of metastatic thyroid cancer - a rare disease in men.

Thompson’s thyroid cancer was detected too late, Pritikin said.

“He was a nuclear engineer and a very patriotic person. If he’d been told earlier about the risks of Iodine 131 exposure from Hanford and from bomb fallout, he could have been checked earlier,” Pritikin said.

“What bothers me the most about this report being delayed so long is the amount of lives that have been lost - and the suffering,” she said.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: COMPILING EVIDENCE The evidence suggesting a link between radiation exposure and thyroid cancer is coming in from several sources, including: Middle-aged people with thyroid disease exposed as young children to Iodine 131 emissions from Hanford’s plutonium factories in the late 1940s and ‘50s. Utah schoolchildren exposed to fallout who’ve developed thyroid tumors. Marshall Islanders exposed to H-bomb tests in the Pacific. Russian children in the Ukraine and Belarus who developed thyroid cancer, a nearly unheard-of disease before the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

This sidebar appeared with the story: COMPILING EVIDENCE The evidence suggesting a link between radiation exposure and thyroid cancer is coming in from several sources, including: Middle-aged people with thyroid disease exposed as young children to Iodine 131 emissions from Hanford’s plutonium factories in the late 1940s and ‘50s. Utah schoolchildren exposed to fallout who’ve developed thyroid tumors. Marshall Islanders exposed to H-bomb tests in the Pacific. Russian children in the Ukraine and Belarus who developed thyroid cancer, a nearly unheard-of disease before the 1986 Chernobyl accident.