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This from http://www.abqjournal.com/news/8news02-13-00.htm

Sunday, February 13, 2000

Drives Health Shift

By Ian Hoffman
Journal Staff Writer
The education of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson
began at the
knee of uranium widows, telling the former
congressman in the lilting
Navajo tongue of miners who died.
Two weeks ago, Richardson's schooling in the Navajo
lands
played out as the U.S. government broke decades of
denial to
report evidence that radiation and dangerous
substances boosted the
risk of illness among 600,000 nuclear-weapons workers.
It was an admission Richardson put in motion months
ago, through
hirings, behind-the-scenes lobbying at the White
House and a new
worker-health survey that, all told, have set the
nation on a path to
compensate ailing cold warriors.
"The entrenched bureaucracy said we won't
acknowledge the
problem," Richardson said in an interview last week.
"I say we won
the Cold War, and we shouldn't turn our back on those
workers
who helped us win it."
"It's time," he said last July, "to stop spending
money litigating
against these workers and focus our efforts on
getting them the help
they need."
The government's move to shoulder potentially tens
of millions of
dollars in health costs from nuclear weapons
production marks a
turning point for the Atomic Age, engineered by a
politician elected
from its birthplace.
"He's driven about this, he's very passionate about
it. He wants to
get something done before he leaves office," said
Richard Miller, a
Washington, D.C.-based policy analyst for the Paper,
Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Union.
Richardson's move, Miller is convinced, "is not
based on optics"
-- D.C. beltway-speak for political acts richer in
image enhancement
than substance. "He's sincere. This particular
crusade was not
poll-tested and focus-grouped."
Physicians warned U.S. weapons executives from the
late 1940s
that workers were being exposed to health-threatening
doses of
radiation, toxic metals and chemicals. The Atomic Energy
Commission sealed those warnings in classified
documents. Later, its
successor agencies relied on the inherent
uncertainties of
epidemiology to reject evidence that some weapons
workers were
dying early because of exposures on the job.
"The government had a policy that basically said no
one's been
hurt and therefore we have no reason to look for the
evidence," said
Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser in the
Energy
Department.
Rejecting clues to work-related disease was in some
ways easy:
Many health studies found U.S. weapons workers were
often much
healthier than the rest of the United States, despite
daily work
exposure to radiation and a host of toxins.
One of the largest such studies came out of Los
Alamos National
Laboratory in 1994. Lab epidemiologist Laurie Wiggs and
colleagues tracked 15,727 white males who had worked
at the lab
since the start of the Manhattan Project in 1943.
Roughly a fifth had
died by the end of 1990. No fatal disease or other
cause of death
was higher for those workers than for white males in
the overall U.S.
population, the study found. In fact, LANL's workers
showed a
pronounced "mortality deficit."
But here's the rub: LANL employees tend to be
better paid, more
educated and better insured, with greater access to
health care --
plus, they're working. The larger U.S. white male
population includes
the ailing, the elderly and unemployed.
The two populations are so different as to make
comparisons
valuable only for detecting the most obvious spikes
in fatal disease.
"The lab always likes to cite the fact that, in
their work force, no
cause of death is higher than in the general
population," said Ken
Silver, a public-health researcher and Los Alamos
worker-compensation advocate. "Well, of course ...
But comparison
to white males in the general population really isn't
of interest."
Yet Wiggs and colleagues also found something else
in their study
-- a statistical tie between rising radiation
exposures and rising death
rates for five types of cancer: chronic lymphocytic
leukemia,
Hodgkin's disease and cancers of the kidney, brain
and esophagus.
An earlier unpublished study of LANL subcontract
workers found
three cases of a rare bone cancer that can be
associated with
radiation.
Radiation has not been implicated as a cause of
chronic
lymphocytic leukemia or Hodgkin's disease, Wiggs
said, and its
linkage to the other three cancers is not well
proven. However,
radiation exposure is widely accepted as increasing
human risk for
brain cancer.
Even so, Wiggs said, "there's by no means a clear
link to
causality." In epidemiology, she said, "it's very
difficult to establish
clearcut causality. At the very best, you're talking
about a
probability."
That would take a more finely tuned study that the
U.S.
Department of Energy never did. The National
Institutes of Health
took over studies of DOE weapons workers in the early
1990s.
That switch was fueled in part by "Dead Reckoning:
A Critical
Review of the Department of Energy's Epidemiologic
Research," a
study published in 1992 by Physicians for Social
Responsibility, a
national nuclear-disarmament and environmental group.
The authors charged the DOE with a massive conflict
of interest
and indicted its health studies as "full of attempts
to deny and
manipulate," said study co-author H. Jack Geiger, a
professor of
community health at the City University of New York.
"There was such a consistent pattern of an unusual
way of looking
at things that you have to ask the question: What was
there to hide?
Why would somebody do it this way?" Geiger said. "You
could infer
that these studies were done in this way with
deniability in mind."
A leading contributor to "Dead Reckoning" was David
Michaels,
an epidemiologist and Geiger colleague at CUNY. He
took a leave
of absence a year ago to become Richardson's
assistant secretary
for environment, safety and health.
The stage was set for a culture change, political
and technical,
inside the Energy Department. Dozens of health
studies would be
scrutinized with an eye to detecting health risks,
rather than
dismissing them.
"I think his work is outstanding," Richardson said
of Michaels last
week. "I said, 'David, I want to be sure we can prove
this.' And he
went after this like a gorilla."
Richardson himself had pushed legislation to
compensate uranium
miners in 1990 after hearing Navajos describe illness
and death
among their miners.
"I found that there probably was a causal link," he
said. "I felt if I
could ever do something about radiation exposure I
would."
By early 1999, Richardson had toured DOE's weapons
sites and
everywhere run into small, largely unorganized groups
of workers
who believed their jobs had made them ill. Newspaper
stories about
their illnesses cropped up in Tennessee, Colorado,
Washington and,
most notably, Paducah, Ky., where the Washington Post
found that
weapons executives intentionally hid from Paducah's
workers the
fact that they were handling plutonium-contaminated
uranium. And
the DOE acknowledged conclusive evidence that
hundreds of its
workers had contracted an incurable lung disease from
exposure to
beryllium, a gray, light metal used in nuclear weapons.
As the White House and Congress agreed on
legislation to
compensate beryllium workers, Richardson persuaded
President
Clinton to order a sweeping study of job-related
illness in the
weapons complex and possible ways to compensate other
ailing
workers.
The study is due out in March. Early drafts report
that workers
are at increased risk of illness from radiation and
chemical exposures
at work. Congress may demand harder evidence, but
Richardson
already is convinced.
"I expect this process will show that our
(liability) should go
beyond beryllium and go to radiation-based cancer,"
Richardson
said. "I was persuaded just by my experiences with
the Navajos and
by people at our sites who said all they wanted was
their day in
court."

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