Locating Victims Of Fallout Difficult Montana Medical Official Urges Annual Thyroid Check

Decades after the harm was done, it’s a daunting task to track people exposed to the radioactive clouds that rained fallout on Montana during the Cold War, the state’s chief medical officer said Thursday.

“It may be very difficult to ever assess the true magnitude of the fallout on Montana citizens,” Dr. Michael Spence said.

Montana officials are scrambling for answers following last week’s partial release of a government study listing the state as the hardest-hit from bomb test fallout.

Last Friday, the National Cancer Institute reluctantly released a summary of its 100,000-page report after a week of press reports about the study and possible health consequences of the fallout. The full study will be made public in October.

The report estimates that more than 231,000 people who lived in 23 counties of the inland West and Midwest - 15 of them in Montana - were exposed to at least 9 rad of radioactive iodine from nuclear tests in the 1950s.

Some of the worst-hit areas were Butte, Bozeman and Great Falls. Because they don’t have the full report, Montana health officials are struggling with incomplete information while trying to avoid panic.

In a press briefing Thursday, one official expressed anger that the National Cancer Institute waited so long to tell Montanans they were put at risk from 1951 to the early 1960s. The NCI has had the data since 1992.

“Why was this kept from the public for so long? If anybody dies from thyroid cancer because of this, that’s really pretty hard to accept,” said Mike Billings of the Department of Public Health and Human Services.

Spence called the NCI report “much ado about nothing” because thyroid cancer is a highly treatable disease and Montana is a sparsely populated state with less than 1 million people.

“It’s scaring people when it’s not that big a problem. I don’t think we’re ever going to see significant mortality from this,” he said.

However, Spence said he wasn’t dismissing the potential health risk of estimated radiation doses above 100 rad to children drinking fresh milk in the early 1950s.

“That is a concern. These data are very troubling,” he said.

Today’s public health rules call for milk to be withheld from children if a 15-rad dose is expected from a nuclear accident.

Many of the most vulnerable Montana residents at the time of the fallout were children of parents employed in the mining and timber industries, Spence said.

Those exposed as children in the high-dose counties have “long since moved to other regions of the state or out of the state,” he said.

For instance, Butte’s Silver Bow County, a former mining boom town, has 13,000 less people now than during the Cold War, Spence said.

Public health experts have gone to the state’s cancer registry for some answers.

But the registry is of limited help because it wasn’t established until 1979 - 28 years after Nevada bomb tests carried the first fallout clouds over Montana.

The state’s thyroid cancer rate doesn’t appear elevated, based on the registry data. But that’s misleading because of the missing data from the Cold War years, Spence said.

Those at highest risk - infants and small children who drank fresh cow or goat milk - could have developed thyroid disease by the mid-1960s but would not be recorded, he said.

Also, due to Montana’s low population, “dealing with small numbers statistically makes it hard to test any theories,” Spence said.

The Montana officials agreed it would take a lengthy and expensive epidemiological study to determine whether people got more thyroid disease than would be expected in an unexposed population.

The emerging furor over the fallout report is a reminder that governments will lie, Billings said.

In 1959, the former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which conducted the atomic bomb tests, said Americans only got a .2- to .4-rad dose from fallout.

That estimate is 100 times less than the average now cited for Western states and 700 times less than what babies may have received in the high-dose Montana counties.

“The real issue for the future is that the military needs to be more honest with us. Why didn’t they tell us early enough when we could have done something to find these children?” Billings said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Map: Measuring Montana’s nuclear bomb tests fallout