As the former medical director of the Navajo Area
Radiation Exposure Screening & Education Program (Navajo Area
Indian Health Service), I would like to add several points to the
generally excellent articles by Laura Paskus, “Navajo Windfall” and
“Navajos pay for industry’s mistakes.”
Having
worked for four years examining patients applying for compensation
under the Radiation Exposure Compen-sation Act (RECA) of 1990 and
the 2000 amendments, my assessment is that RECA remains
fundamentally flawed. While Congress has admitted responsibility
and apologized for not ensuring that more aggressive regulatory
measures were taken to protect the health of former Cold War
uranium workers, the “worker’s compensation approach” of
requiring documentation of objective disability or impairment as
the criteria for receiving a “compassionate payment” fails to
recognize the basic harm suffered by those workers. Under the last
15 years of the current law, fewer than 25 percent of those
eligible for RECA have been compensated.
The federal
government has yet to formally respond to the National Research
Council April 2005 “Assessment of the Scientific Information for
the Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program.” The
authors, nationally recognized radiation science experts,
recommended that the eligibility criteria for downwinders of the
Nevada Test Site be changed from a politically derived geographic
area to a more objective dose-calculator model. This would allow
any American exposed to Cold War-era Nevada Test Site radiation
potentially to meet RECA criteria for compensation.
Bruce Baird Struminger, MD
Northern
Navajo Medical Center Indian Health Service
Shiprock, New
Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline RECA needs revision.
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