Thyroid Study To Go On Internet Long-Awaited Hanford Report Expected To Be Released Thursday

A long-awaited study of thyroid disease among Hanford downwinders will be made public Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The federal study was launched a decade ago, after the government’s belated admission that radiation releases from Hanford during the early years of the Cold War were massive and dangerous.

The Hanford Thyroid Disease Study is the first ever to locate and examine people living in the path of radiation emissions from a U.S. weapons production site. The only other civilians to have been tracked and studied are Japanese A-bomb survivors, residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to H-bomb tests, and Utah schoolchildren showered with fallout from nuclear bomb tests in Nevada.

The new study has enormous implications for future Hanford studies, for the downwinder litigation wending its way through the federal courts, and for the government’s credibility in the aftermath of the nuclear arms race.

The CDC has clamped a tight lid on its findings until Thursday’s 3 p.m. release at a news conference in Richland. The agency will brief members of Congress on Wednesday, said a spokesman for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

“CDC is treating this like a national secret,” said scientist Owen Hoffman, a health studies consultant who recently finished a health risk assessment for the state of Tennessee on radiation releases from a weapons plant at Oak Ridge.

“This is highly unusual. They’ve either found something way beyond what they expected, or they haven’t found anything,” Hoffman said of the Hanford study.

“They are controlling this as tightly as they can,” said Lynne Stembridge of Spokane, executive director of the Hanford Education Action League (HEAL) and chairwoman of a federal advisory committee on nuclear-related health studies.

Officials at other federal agencies, including the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta and the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., are also saying little.

“There is a blackout on discussing the CDC study,” said ATSDR spokesman Greg Thomas.

His agency has been trying unsuccessfully to get $12.9 million from DOE to launch a new program to track the health of 14,000 people exposed as children to Hanford’s radiation releases. But DOE has refused so far to pay for it.

DOE and ATSDR officials discussed the CDC study and its implications for the Hanford medical monitoring project at a meeting last week in Washington, D.C., said Dr. James Smith of CDC’s radiation studies branch.

But Smith said he can’t talk yet.

The Hanford thyroid study’s implications for the ATSDR work will be discussed in Richland on Thursday, said Paul Seligman, a DOE undersecretary for environment, safety and health.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle conducted the study for CDC and announced plans last year to release it in March after publishing the results in a scientific journal.

But the CDC, in response to public pressure last fall from members of several federal advisory committees, decided to move up the release date.

“We felt the study was taking an absurd amount of time, and their first priority was to release this information to the public,” said Judith Jurji of Seattle, a Hanford downwinder on the CDC study’s advisory committee.

The National Academy of Sciences also told the CDC it wouldn’t review the Hanford study until it had been made public.

Attorneys for a group of Hanford downwinders have subpoenaed the study and urged its quick release to meet discovery deadlines imposed by U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald in the Hanford downwinders litigation.

“It’s going to have major ramifications,” said attorney Bryan Coluccio of Seattle.

Congress authorized the study in 1988, following revelations that Hanford’s Cold War releases of radioactive Iodine-131 were large enough to pose health risks.

The CDC contracted with the Fred Hutchinson center in 1989. The researchers conducted a pilot study from 1990 to 1994, followed by an expanded study.

The study was designed to see if there’s a connection between Hanford’s radiation releases and a variety of thyroid diseases, including cancer, hypothyroidism, benign thyroid nodules and abnormalities in the adjacent parathyroid glands.

People selected for the expanded study were identified from birth records in the counties near Hanford. Those chosen were born from 1940 to 1946 and were infants or small children during Hanford’s peak emission years, 1945-1952.

ONLINE The full study will be made available at 3 p.m. Thursday on the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Web site, www.fhcrc.org/science/phs/htds. PUBLIC MEETING Fred Hutchinson researchers will answer questions about the study Thursday evening, said Scott Davis, an epidemiologist and the study’s lead researcher. The public meeting is at 7 p.m. at the Hanford Doubletree. There’s also a toll-free hotline for questions: 1-800-638-4837.