A cover-up over fallout?
The
federally funded National Cancer Institute has been sitting on some
disturbing news: 10,000 to 72,000 people may develop thyroid cancer
from exposure to clouds of radioactive fallout that traveled across
the United States between 1951 and 1958.
An
institute study shows that children living thousands of miles from
nuclear bomb tests in Nevada may have been exposed to dangerously
high levels of radiation. Fallout “hot spots’ include central
Idaho, eastern Montana, parts of Utah and Colorado, the Dakotas,
the Midwest and the East Coast – especially upstate New York.
People who were under 5 at the time of exposure are at the highest
risk, the study says.
The National Cancer
Institute completed its study in 1992, but only made its findings
public recently. All 100,000 pages of data won’t be available to
the public until Oct. 1.
Institute officials have
not explained why they waited five years to release the study. The
delay, Tim Connor of the federal Centers for Disease Control told
the Spokesman-Review on July 24, is a “major public health
scandal.” Spokeswoman Nancy Nelson says the study’s authors “are
having problems deciding how to make this study public.”
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., has
been trying for months to get the study released. He told the
Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., that the delay is “either a
remarkable demonstration of ineptitude or extraordinarily contrived
efforts to withhold information.”
*Karen Dorn
Steele
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A cover-up over fallout?.
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