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National Association of Atomic VeteransPortland Area Atomic Veterans Radium TreatmentsFrom: radproject@aol.com (RADPROJECT) The recent news conference by the Pentagon on what the VA describes as a "massive outreach program" related to Nasal Radium Irradiation (NRI) failed to mention the number of servicemen who have actually been contacted by the DOD. Because notice was restricted only to those vets that the DOD has been able to absolutely document as receiving Nasal Radium Irradiation (NRI) to shrink adenoids, letters have gone off to only 42 men of the 73 having been verified through medical and service records as having received NRI, out of an estimated 20,000 veterans who are estimated to have received NRI. Of course, the DOD has searched for records of NRI use in the routine medical and service files, places where the records were not kept. In the case of the experiment conducted on submariners, notes on each persons radium irradiation were kept on special Medical Research Lab (MRL) data cards maintained at the MRL at the Groton, CT sub base. A logbook of over 1,000 names of NRI treated submariners maintained by the original human experiment lead physician, Dr. Henry L. Haines, turned up in a file cabinet at the Submarine base in Groton, CT in March 1996. However, the DOD is not notifying these more than 1,000 men who were identified by name and service number because the routine service records in St. Louis do not document NRI treatments!! This is a total farce and an insult to the veteran community. If the DOD really wanted to reach potentially affected vets, they would have instituted a broad, honest outreach program using their resources to reach all vets at risk even if the DOD and VA don't have absolute documentation of NRI treatments in each individuals normal records. All treated veterans still deserve notice and medical work-ups. See my letter to the New England Journal of Medicine for Jan. 2, 1992 ("Radium Exposure in US Military Personnel", 1992; Vol 326; p. 71-72) or the medical news and perspectives column which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Government is in No Rush to Study Thousands of Veterans Who Received nasal Radiation Therapy", Vol 274, No. 11, pp. 858-859) which was published based on a poster session I presented to a professional radiation protection society meeting in mid-1995 on the Nasal Radium Irradiation issue and the unmet obligations of government and medical institutions to deal with potential health risks. At the time of the letter to the New England Journal of Medicine noted above, the Navy published a response that the veterans treated in the Navy (approximately 10,000 total) with NRI had a "right to privacy" not a right-to-know they were at risk. The Navy also maintained that the risks were trivial and that any epidemiological study was essentially impossible. They also stated in 1992 that all use of NRI was "standard medical practice" when they were later forced to admit that its initial use in Project X-434 carried out at the Submarine base in Groton, CT from 1945-46 was a "human radiation experiment". What the Goverment has refused to acknowledge in its recent report "Building Public Trust" issued in late March 1997 detailing its planned response to the recommendations of the Presidents Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) , is that there was a group of 291 children who were part of a human experiment conducted by Johns Hopkins University from 1949-54. The "action" report issued by the US government did mention vets would be proposed for priority medical care, but children treated with NRI were not even mentioned!! For a more detailed discussion of the failure of the U.S. government to recommend medical notice and followup to NRI treated vets and children as part of the ACHRE report to the President see my testimony to the Senate Government Affairs Hearing on "Human Radiation Experiments" (S. Hrg. 104-588, March 12, 1996) titled "Nasal Radium Irradiation & the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments -A Failure of Process: Bad Science/ Bad Medicine/ Bad Ethics". This testimony is on the world wide web at: http;//www.brown.edu/Courses/Bio_Community_Health_168C/farber.html The children in the Baltimore NRI experiment reviewed by the ACHRE report had a calculated cancer mortality risk 10 times higher than NRI treated veterans and were the only group out of 4,000 experiments ACHRE reviewed which exceeded its arbitrary threshhold for medical monitoring and notice. After WWII NRI use exploded into standard medical practice, despite strong warnings by numerous physicians in the late 1940s that NRI's use to treat non-malignant conditions was ill-advised and dangerous. One ENT physician at a medical conference on the use of NRI to treat adenoids and tonsils in 1949 authored a paper titled: "The Abuse of Nasopharyngeal Radium Irradiation" in which he criticized his fellow ENT by stating that the "use of nasal radium irradiation had reached the racket stage" because so many physicians were doing it without proper medical indications and because its use was so lucrative. A recent workshop on NRI organized by the CDC and VA after they were forced to confront the issue due to a Senate Hearing yielded CDC estimates that between 571,000 and 2.6 million children received NRI from 1946-1961 as "standard medical practice". Because of the huge non-experimental size of the NRI treated cohort and the unwillingness of the CDC and the medical profession to deal with the issue, it appears that the experimental use of NRI on children has been swept under the rug by not being mentioned in the "Building Public Trust" report from the government. It seems that the handful of vets who have been provided notice by the VA (42 men out of 20,000 treated) were done just as a token, hollow gesture in order that the government could claim it was dealing with the issue. In reality, they are merely handing out inaccurate information to a handful of elderly vets and continuing to ignore the real mandates of this public health issue. Stewart Farber, MS Public Health Director
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