Cold War’S Invisible Menace Downwinder Sues Doe For Thyroid Screening
The Cold War isn’t over for Trisha Pritikin.
It’s in her weakening bones, her fatigue - and her deep anger at the government’s failure to help her family and thousands of others exposed as children to Hanford’s radiation releases.
Pritikin was born in Richland in 1950, where her father was a Hanford nuclear engineer. His secretive job: making plutonium for nuclear bombs.
She played on the shores of the Columbia River without knowing its radioactive hazards. Her parents opened her bedroom window on hot desert nights - when the winds held deadly toxins from Hanford’s poorly filtered plutonium plants. They didn’t know the night air was unsafe.
For the first 10 years of her life, she innocently drank milk that proved to be a bigger threat than the distant Russians. The milk contained iodine-131, especially dangerous to the tiny thyroid gland of a growing child.
“I drank a ton of local cow’s milk. I have a shrunken thyroid about the size of a 6-year-old’s,” she said.
Now a 47-year-old Berkeley, Calif., attorney, Pritikin has hypothyroidism. She suspects Hanford’s mission led to her father’s recent death at age 79 from a rare and virulent thyroid cancer - and triggered her mother’s and her own thyroid disease. She’s a plaintiff in a massive downwinders’ lawsuit filed in 1991.
“We have no family history of thyroid disease except for those of us who lived in Richland,” she said.
This spring, Pritikin filed a new lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Spokane to force the Department of Energy to pay $12.9 million to screen 14,000 people exposed as children to Hanford’s pollution for thyroid and other diseases.
DOE has asked Congress for $5 million to start the program, but says it can’t afford to take $12.9 million out of Hanford cleanup funds. Meanwhile, DOE has spent more than three times that since 1991 - $40 million - to fight the Hanford downwinder lawsuits, records show. No trial dates have been set.
Pritikin, top officials of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the Northwest Environmental Education Foundation have scheduled a briefing in Spokane on Thursday to discuss the impasse over the thyroid screening program.
Spokane nuclear activists have played a leading role in forcing government accountability on Hanford issues, said Larry Shook of the Spokane foundation.
The 14,000 children that ATSDR wants to track got at least a 10-rad dose to their thyroid glands in the mid-1940s and ‘50s. Most were exposed by drinking milk produced by cows that had eaten contaminated grass.
A 10-rad dose has been shown to damage a child’s thyroid, said Elaine Ron of the National Cancer Institute. It’s equivalent to 25 mammograms, and increases the risk of developing thyroid cancer by 20 to 50 percent.
Because Hanford is a federal Superfund site, the DOE is obligated by law to pay the ATSDR, a sister federal agency, for the downwinders’ monitoring program. DOE has provided nearly $36 million to ATSDR since 1991 for Superfund-related work.
In a June 1 letter to Congress, Energy Secretary Federico Pena said DOE is willing to switch $5 million from the agency’s nuclear fuels program to help pay for the monitoring. Nothing has been appropriated so far.
“They are refusing to pay for a mandatory program required under the law,” said Tom Foulds, a downwinders’ attorney who represents Pritikin in the new lawsuit.
“Nobody disagrees that health monitoring is important,” said DOE spokeswoman Karen Randolph in Richland. “It’s a matter of where the funding comes from. Our stakeholders don’t want us carving it out of funds designated for cleanup.”
DOE’s stance is a cynical effort to pit cleanup against health monitoring, said Lynne Stembridge of Spokane’s Hanford Education Action League.
She heads an ATSDR citizen’s advisory committee on Hanford health effects. Its July meeting has been canceled because DOE won’t pay.
“DOE is reverting to the bad old days when it picked the laws it chose to obey,” Stembridge said.
Pritikin says her own medical history is an example of why the monitoring program is needed for Hanford downwinders.
As a teenager, she stopped menstruating. Her concerned parents sent her to Spokane, where she spent summers with her grandmother, children’s book author Neta Lohnes Frazier, in a Browne’s Addition mansion. Pritikin later married into the family that invented the low-fat Pritikin diet - which didn’t cure her mysterious health problems.
Pritikin graduated from law school in 1983, after struggling with fatigue and chest pains that doctors blamed on law school stress. She married Ken Pritikin in 1985, the son of diet doctor Nathan Pritikin. Her health problems continued.
A trip to Spokane in 1987 solved the medical mystery.
While in town visiting her grandmother, she picked up a copy of The Spokesman-Review and read about Hanford’s secret for the first time. The U.S. government had recently admitted that vast parts of Eastern Washington were contaminated during Hanford’s Cold War mission.
She returned to California, where in 1988 a doctor correctly diagnosed her illness as thyroid disease. She started to take synthetic thyroid, and immediately got pregnant with her first child. A second child followed, who is now 6-1/2. They are both healthy.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” she says.
But a decade later, the government is still ignoring those exposed as children at Hanford, Pritikin says.
Last year, the ATSDR announced its program to monitor the 14,000 downwinders. It was an unprecedented government overture to care for a large population of Americans harmed during the Cold War, said Robert Spengler of the registry’s health studies division.
The program is expected to detect from 54 to 84 thyroid cancers, according to estimates drawn from other exposed populations. It would also find about 565 benign or precancerous thyroid growths and nearly 100 cases of thyroid deficiency, a precursor to heart disease and metabolic problems.
A new ATSDR registry also would couple thyroid exams with an exposure registry of 17,000 people - expanding scientific knowledge about the health problems of radiationexposed people.
DOE’s critics harbor a deep suspicion that DOE won’t pay for the program because it would set a legal precedent at all of its nuclear weapons sites nationwide.
It could also set a legal benchmark for the government’s conduct of its nuclear bomb testing program, which spread radioactive fallout from bomb tests in Nevada across the nation in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
According to a long-delayed National Cancer Institute fallout study released last fall after public pressure, thousands of infants and children in the inland West got fallout doses up to 160 rad from 1951 to 1958. There’s been no screening program established.
While Pritikin fights the DOE, she’s also had to fight resistance at home. Perry Thompson, her father, denied Hanford could have harmed his family until his thyroid cancer was diagnosed in 1996.
He began to change his mind as the disease ravaged his body. “I watched his huge eyes get afraid as masses developed in his lungs and brain. He just got eaten up in front of me,” she said.
Her worst realization: If the monitoring program had been in place earlier, it might have saved her father’s life.
On the day he died last year, Thompson received a letter from DOE headquarters. He’d written to the weapons agency to ask whether he’d ever been subject to any radiation experiments at Hanford.
The DOE’s response: He was in Richland during the Green Run, a 1949 secret military experiment that released a huge cloud of iodine-131 over Richland and Walla Walla.
The loss of her father has made Pritikin even more determined. She’s spent thousands of dollars of her own money, pressing on despite more health problems. Her kneecaps are degenerating, and she often spends several hours a day in a wheelchair. She tires easily.
“This is not about money,” she said. “It’s about justice. The injured people should get an apology, and their health problems should be monitored and treated. Is that too much to ask?”
2 Graphics with maps: 1. The extent of exposure for children 2. Tracking survivors