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Fallout link to thyroid cancer gets boost

If cancer victim lived in '50s, Nevada tests could be to blame

By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News
Almost anyone diagnosed with thyroid cancer who was a child in
the
United States during open-air nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site,
and drank
fresh milk from stores or farms, could make a case that development of
the
disease likely was influenced by radioactive fallout.
That's the belief of F. Owen Hoffman, one of the authors of a new
report summarizing impacts of fallout on thyroid cancer. The report is
"Thyroid
Doses and Risk of Thyroid Cancer from Exposure to I-131 from the Nevada
Test
Site," prepared by SENES Oak Ridge Inc., consultants based in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
It calculates risks, breaking out several areas throughout the
country
and analyzing the danger of thyroid cancer to people born in certain
years.
Federal fallout compensation is available only to people who
lived in
selected counties. But as documented years ago, fallout from open-air
nuclear
blasts at the test site fell throughout the country.
The National Institutes of Health has set up a fallout risk
calculator
on the Internet, which is useful for figuring exposure and risk. The
program
asks those using it for facts such as age, gender and residency.
SENES' study makes some of the same calculations for several
groups of
citizens, with birth year, gender and location playing important roles.
It
calculates risks based on these factors and shows estimates about
exposure.
The new report's risk calculator is updated in a way that is
similar to
an improvement the NIH plans for its online site, according to the
study.
"Virtually all 160 million Americans who lived in the continental
U.S.
during the nuclear testing period were exposed to I-131," the report
says.
Radioactive Iodine 131 would churn into the air with a blast's
fireball. It would travel in clouds and drop as fallout. Cattle eating
contaminated
grass would pass along I-131 in their milk, and the material tended to
accumulate in thyroid glands of people who drank milk.
The federal government has laws governing compensation to atomic
workers who were exposed to radiation and developed cancer.
For compensation, there must be at least a 1 percent chance that
the
baseline risk of thyroid cancer has doubled for the atomic worker,
Hoffman,
president and director of SENES, said when contacted by the Deseret
Morning News.
The baseline represents the risk to unexposed people of the same age,
gender
and other attributes.
Almost anyone in the United States who was "unfortunate enough to
have
been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a fairly rare disease, would
qualify (for
compensation) regardless of location of residence throughout the 3,090
counties of the USA," Hoffman said in an e-mail response.
That is, they would qualify only if:
• The laws for exposed workers were to apply to members of the
public
exposed off-site, which they don't.
• Fallout exposures mostly occurred when the person was a
child.
• And "during the time of atmospheric weapons testing, the
individual
consumed fresh sources of store-bought or farm-produced milk."
"The look-up tables (in the report) contain estimates of doses
and
risks for eight representative birth cohorts and 67 locations in eight
regions
around the continental United States," the new publication says.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 (amended in 2002)
does
not cover many millions of Americans exposed to fallout during the
period of
open-air nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. It provides money for
some
specialized workers such as uranium mine ore haulers, plus affected
civilians
who lived in 10 counties of southern and other parts of Nevada and
Arizona.
But the report makes clear that the radioactive Iodine 131 from
atomic
tests was carried in fallout that hit throughout the country, making
its way
into milk sold commercially. Usually fallout happened during rainfall,
but
sometimes it hit without precipitation.
Some of the hardest-hit areas were both southern and northern
Utah, and
parts of Montana, Kansas, Colorado, Vermont, South Dakota, Idaho, Iowa
and
other areas.
For a woman born in Salt Lake City in 1952 who has lived in the
area to
the present, who has consumed retail commercial milk and who has never
had
thyroid cancer, the chance of coming down with that disease is about
6.6 out of
1,000. (That is a mean, with the lowest figure 1.2 and the highest 28.)
If she had lived in an area that was not peppered by fallout, her
chance of coming down with thyroid cancer would be 1.8 per 1,000.
Fallout in Salt Lake City increased the risk of thyroid cancer
for a
woman born that year by 3.7 times, compared with the risk from natural
sources.
Men's chances of exposure were lower because male babies are not as
susceptible to ill effects of the radioactive iodine that worked its
way into milk
during the era of open-air testing.
Of groups whose risks were calculated, the highest mean estimate
was
for women born in Gunnison, Colo., in 1952. Risk of such a woman
developing
thyroid cancer was calculated at a mean of 18 out of 1,000, or 10 times
as likely
to develop the rare disease as someone not exposed who was born that
year.
However, it would be hard to find an American born during the
period of
open-air testing at the National Test Site — early 1951 through the
middle of
1962 — who wasn't exposed as a baby.
Radiation doses to the thyroid gland and the risk of developing
thyroid
cancer depended on age at the time of each nuclear test, location and
type
and amount of milk consumed. Milk from goats posed a greater danger,
which could
have implications for Navajos who drank goat's milk.
Breast milk was safer than cow's milk available commercially, the
report adds.
Support for the SENES project came in the form of a grant from
the
Citizens' Monitoring and Technical Assessment Fund, according to the
report's
cover. Its authors are Ann G. Moore, A. Iulian Apostoaei, Brian A.
Thomas and
Hoffman.