Panel says all cancer claims need look

A panel of experts is recommending the government open the door to hearing cancer claims from people in all states who think they were affected by nuclear fallout from 1950s weapons tests in Nevada.

However, those cancer victims would have to prove it was the nuclear fallout that caused their illness, and making that case would be very difficult.

The recommendation was released Thursday by a panel under the National Research Council, the chief operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The panel’s finding is a nod to scientific data that wasn’t available in 1990 when the government initially apologized to cancer victims with a law that set up a compensation fund.

Whether the proposal will have any practical effect seems questionable.

The data suggest people from as far away as the East Coast could have been exposed to radiation carried from the Nevada test sites by wind and weather patterns. Currently, only people who worked with uranium and residents of certain counties in three states – Utah, Nevada and Arizona – are eligible for the $50,000 to $100,000 lump-sum payments.

The panel did not recommend making residents of additional designated geographic areas eligible for compensation, as many in Idaho had hoped the panel would do.

Reacting to Thursday’s recommendation, U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said he plans to introduce legislation within weeks to immediately add the entire state of Idaho to the existing geographic eligibility standards for cash payments under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

“The entire state of Idaho falls clearly in the higher dose level, higher than many of counties in the states that are already included in the program,” Crapo said in an interview. “In the long-term, the way we try to geographically limit this issue is mistaken and we ought to instead look at causation and risk under a new law.”

The other members of Idaho’s all-Republican congressional delegation — U.S. Reps. Mike Simpson and C.L. “Butch” Otter and Sen. Larry Craig — issued a statement Thursday endorsing Crapo’s proposed legislation.

A 1997 National Cancer Institute study ranked four Idaho counties — Blaine, Custer, Lemhi and Gem — just behind Montana’s Meagher County as getting the highest doses of Iodine-131, an isotope released when a nuclear bomb is detonated. Since I-131 accumulates in the thyroid gland, the study raised concerns that fallout could lead to thyroid cancer in people who were exposed to the isotope as children.

Sheri Garmon, who believes exposure to fallout during her childhood in Gem County, Idaho, is responsible for the thyroid and breast cancer that has now spread to her liver, said the new criteria may be too rigid for many so-called “downwinders” to qualify for compensation before they die.

“We want them to look at that personal assessment the same way you’d look at someone who was pushed in front of an oncoming train,” said Garmon, who now lives in Vancouver, Wash. “We all know the cause of the death was the push, we don’t want to have to prove somebody pushed us, tied us down and held us there until the train rolled over our bodies.”

U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, a Utah Democrat and longtime advocate for compensation, said it’s not immediately clear when or how Congress would act on the panel’s recommendation.

Currently, anyone who has one of 19 kinds of cancer and who was a child in the 1950s living in one of the designated areas downwind of the Nevada test site is eligible for money. But if the program were expanded to include all 50 states and U.S. territories, as the board suggests, victims would have to prove to at least some degree their cancer was caused by radioactive fallout.

“In most cases it is unlikely that exposure to radiation from fallout was a substantial contributing cause to developing cancer,” the board writes in a nearly 390-page report. “The problem faced by the legal system is that no specific form of cancer is caused only by radiation.”

The review was ordered after complaints that the compensation bill shortsightedly included only certain counties in Utah, Arizona and Nevada — ignoring others that were as polluted or worse than eligible regions.

A scientific model in the board’s report showed people in unprotected counties in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Nebraska, Tennessee, Vermont and New York could have absorbed higher levels of radiation to the thyroid than people in at least one of the Utah counties eligible for compensation.

So far, the federal government has paid more than $700 million to more than 11,000 radiation victims and their families affected by radioactive exposure between 1945 and 1971.

The board was asked to recommend improvements for the program, be it covering more diseases or wider geographic areas.

Board members intentionally ignored the question of cost, instead preferring to let Congress make those calculations, said R. Julian Preston, an EPA researcher who worked on the recommendation. The board also didn’t weigh in on how Congress should refine eligibility requirements with the gates open to everyone across the country.

Instead, Preston said, the board was charged with evaluating whether the government’s standards for eligibility were fair in light of new information.

Jonathan Moreno, head of the University of Virginia’s Biomedical Ethics program and one of several academics who peer-reviewed the study, said the board’s conclusion is based on science, regardless of whether that satisfies seriously ill people who blame the tests for their suffering.

“The fact that terrible things have happened to people can’t necessarily be traceable to a specific event,” he said. “So it’s awful to have to tell someone that you can’t help them. But I think often that’s the honest answer in many of these instances.”