Bush Administration Kills Nuclear Fallout Study

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
March 30, 2005

Bush Administration Kills Nuclear Fallout Study
Downwinders be Damned
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Just as the Bush administration contemplates ordering up a new generation of nuclear weapons, which may in turn lead to a new round of nuclear testing in the high deserts of Nevada, the Center for Disease Control, a federal outpost in Atlanta charged with supervising the nation's physical well-being, pulled the plug on a long-term study into the dire health consequences from nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s on people living in the American southwest.

The study, which has been underway for seven years, has been tracking the thyroid conditions of 4,000 former students who lived in southwestern Utah and eastern Nevada in 1965, at the height of open-air testing of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. The lead researcher, Dr. Joseph L. Lyons, a professor at the University of Utah, was informed via a curtly worded letter on March 21 that funding for the study had been inexplicably yanked.

The letter terminating the research in midstream was written by Michael A. McGeehin, director of the CDC's Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects. McGeehin claimed the study was killed because of financial considerations. "The CDC does not have the resources to extend funding for this study beyond the current budget period," McGeehin wrote. "We recommend that you take measures to close out this study by the end of the current budget period, which will occur on August 31, 2005."

Lyons believes, with good reason, that the study was axed for political reasons. "The only interpretation I can put on it is that the Bush administration doesn't want to know the health effects of fallout on American citizens," Lyons told the Deseret News. "I've never know it to happen before," says Lyons, who has been researching the links between cancer and fallout since 1977.


http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair03302005.html

[MadHound]

1. Yep, don't want to alarm the people that their government is dosing them

And putting all of us at risk, not just those residents in the Southwest.

My old chem teacher used to tell us how during the bomb tests during the fifties and early sixties he would go out a day or two after a test and take a swipe off of his car. He would then go into work and put the swipe in front of a Geiger counter and watch the machine go crazy. And we live in Mid Missouri, so that tells you how far this shit carries. I also believe I read an article a couple of decades ago how cow milk in Wisconsin was turning up a bit hot. Turned out that the grass in Wisconsin was getting fallout, the cows were eating the grass, and the radioactive substances were turning up in their milk.

Just gotta love a government that poisons its own people:eyes:

[bigtree]

2. A good editorial from 1998

Medicine & Global Survival -- Editorials: 1998
An Attempt to Come Clean?
Or Continuing Obfuscation?

In 1982 the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 97-414, obliging the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to assess the iodine-131 (I-131) exposure of the American people as a result of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing during the first two decades of the nuclear era. The responsibility for overseeing this task was given to Dr. Bruce Wacholz, a health physicist whose prior work experience was in the secretive world of the Department of Energy.

Fifteen years later, and only after pressure from such groups as Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Military Production Network, the results of this NCI dose reconstruction study are being made available to the public <1> . This extraordinary delay was disquieting and even more so were many of the preliminary results.

To assess the implications of the results of the study, Senators Tom Harkin and Arlen Spector held hearings in the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services on 1 October, 1997. An implicit concern was whether the delay in releasing the results of the NCI study was caused by unavoidable technical difficulties, or was a continuation of an historical pattern of distortion and minimization by the U.S. government of the health effects of nuclear testing.

Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the NCI, defended the study and minimized the confidence with which past studies linked radioactive fallout to thyroid cancer <2>.

Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, a distinguished professor of epidemiology at the University of Utah, gave a very different story. He said:

http://www.ippnw.org/MGS/V5N1RushEd.html