Fallout Report Fell Through The Cracks Study Director Apologizes For Delay, Says There Was No Intent To Deceive

Top officials of the National Cancer Institute apologized Wednesday at a U.S. Senate hearing for mismanaging a major study of atomic bomb fallout.

The hearing was called to determine why the cancer institute delayed release of its massive study until 1997 when the basic findings - higher cancer risks for millions of Americans exposed as children to fallout - were known as early as 1989.

The cancer institute didn’t release the study, ordered by Congress in 1983, until after segments of it had been leaked to the press last summer.

The fallout is expected to cause between 11,300 and 122,000 additional thyroid cancers, the institute estimates. Some of the highest exposures were to children in the 1950s in Idaho, Montana and the Middle West.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Senate Government Affairs subcommittee chairwoman, criticized study director Dr. Bruce Wachholz for failing to inform the American people earlier about increased thyroid cancer risks.

“Why did you wait so long before releasing this information to the public?” Collins asked Wachholz, chief of the institute’s Radiation Effects Branch.

“The sense was that nobody was really terribly interested in this,” Wachholz replied.

He said he put the report on the “back burner” to work on a study of the health effects of the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion in Ukraine.

“The public can’t be interested in what the public does not know,” Collins said. “The interest was enormous once it was released.”

“I am sincerely sorry this happened. There was no intent to deceive,” Wachholz said.

National Cancer Institute Director Dr. Richard Klausner also apologized, saying he wasn’t even aware of the study until Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., asked about it last year.

Daschle was angry because Wachholz had not responded to his earlier inquiries about fallout in South Dakota, and the senator fired off a letter to Klausner last spring.

“Somewhere, obviously, this fell through the cracks,” said Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio. “We shouldn’t have to heckle people to get a report.”

Another witness suggested fears over public reaction may have played a part in delaying release of the study.

The institute was concerned about “the negative impact that the study might have on public perception about the legacy of atmospheric testing of nuclear devices,” said Owen Hoffman, a consultant on the fallout research and now president of a private consulting firm on risk analysis.

The national fallout study was mandated by Congress 15 years ago in bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.

Americans should have been warned earlier and should be screened now for slow-growing thyroid disease, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said.

Radioactive Iodine 131 in fallout settles in the thyroid gland, increasing the risk of nodules or cancer.

Harkin said he recently lost his older brother to thyroid cancer, and suffers from thyroid problems himself. The Harkin boys drank raw milk from the backyard cow on their family farm in Cumming, Iowa, in the fallout era, he said.

He criticized a recent recommendation of a National Academy of Sciences medical committee against widespread thyroid cancer screening for millions of exposed Americans.

“We’re dealing with real people- …who need this information,” Harkin said.

In early September, the Institute of Medicine committee called regional screening unnecessary because it would provide no significant health benefits.

Screening “could result in needless worry and unnecessary surgeries because the tests used to detect the disease are so often inconclusive,” said Robert Lawrence, a Johns Hopkins School of Public Health professor and the chairman of the panel.

That recommendation is at odds with an Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry proposal to screen 14,000 Hanford downwinders for thyroid cancer.

The NCI did not fulfill its congressional mandate to study all cancers from other nuclear elements besides Iodine 131 in the bomb tests, said two doctors who wrote a book critical of the government’s epidemiological research at nuclear weapons sites nationwide.

Drs. David Rush, professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, and Dr. Jack Geiger, emeritus professor at the City University of New York Medical School, said there is more work to be done to fully assess Americans’ risk from weapons tests.