The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is refusing to fund additional work by the U’s Joseph Lyon, whose two earlier studies linked fallout from U.S. atomic testing to leukemia and other illnesses.
The agency promises to provide money only through this year, the last year of its five-year research contract with the U.
But Sen. Bob Bennett is trying to work out an agreement between the CDC and U health researchers for funding to complete the study that traces thyroid cancer in downwinders, people who lived and worked downwind of U.S. atomic weapons testing and who were exposed to nuclear fallout.
U researchers asked Bennett for help after learning last winter that the CDC would not extend its funding of their research.
Bennett has begun negotiations with CDC bureaucrats hoping to find a way to allow the work to continue.
Lyon, a professor in the division of family and preventive medicine, blames the CDC for policies that have put his project off schedule and that threaten to shut down the study just as it begins the physical examinations that will answer the question that initially inspired the U’s research: What health damage did the bomb tests do?
He suspects that the federal government wants his work to end because it might be “potentially embarrassing” if the public learned the extent of fallout- related health damage.
The CDC won’t discuss its reasons for rejecting additional funding for the U’s research.
About $2.6 million has been spent?all but $600,000 of it came from the CDC.
According to Lyon, it will take about $4 million more and two or three additional years to cover health assessments and thyroid gland examinations for some 4,000 downwinders.
The findings will educate scientists and policy makers about what happens when healthy people are accidentally exposed to radiation.
The results will also help explain how people might be affected by something like the detonation of a small nuclear device by terrorists.
When researchers conducted 119 atomic tests between 1951 and 1958 at the Nevada Test Site., the U.S. nuclear weapons program assured citizens for years that they were safe.
In 1974, federal authorities said their own examination of children confirmed that the fallout had not caused health damage, but a 1997 study suggested at least 15,000 cancer deaths and 20,000 nonfatal cancers since 1951 were caused by nuclear-weapons testing worldwide. The study also showed that no one born in the United States after 1951 escaped exposure.
In 1990, Lyon’s lab confirmed government tests showing that, after the atomic tests began, children in Washington County had an increase in leukemia deaths of seven times that of the general population. Other studies completed that year found a threefold increase in thyroid disease, but many considered those results as inconclusive.
At this point, Lyons has heard nothing new. He says Bennett’s office is actively working with the CDC to resolve this issue. He continues to hope that additional funding and time can be secured.
“Senator Bennett is very supportive of these studies,” said Mary Jane Collipriest, communications director for Bennett’s Washington, D.C., Office. “They got off the ground in ’98 through his work to secure funding. The fifth year of funding has been approved and will be distributed in the near future. “
According to Collipriest, Dr. Lyon came to Bennett to express frustration with limitations he saw being placed on his efforts by CDC, which maintains that some of the activities Dr. Lyon wants to pursue are outside the scope of the cooperative agreement which outlines the course of the study.
“At this point, Senator Bennett is acting as a mediator between the two hoping they can find a solution so the study can continue,” Collipriest said.