The federal government, after already spending $8 million on the project, has yanked funding for a study of possible connections between thyroid health effects and the radioactive fallout that hit southern Utah and nearby areas of Nevada decades ago.

The study has rechecked about 1,300 of 4,000 former students who lived in southwestern Utah and eastern Nevada, plus a control group of Arizona residents.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, ended the program.

"CDC does not have the financial resources available to continue the project," agency spokesman John Florence told the Deseret Morning News. "It's a funding issue."

Notification of the study's halt came in a March 21 letter from Michael A. McGeehin, director of the CDC Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects, to Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, a University of Utah researcher who has been heading the investigation.

Lyon said he is loath to use the word cover-up, but it seems the federal government does not want to know about health effects of fallout on American citizens. Still, "That's the only interpretation I can place on it," he said.

Asked how often the CDC pulls funding in the middle of a major study, Lyon said, "I've never known it to happen before. I haven't done a survey there, but it's the first time I've heard" about such a thing happening.

Lyon's earlier studies, beginning in 1977, demonstrated that fallout from open-air nuclear bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site caused cancer downwind. After his report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 1979 and another review showed excess leukemia deaths, Congress passed a fallout compensation measure.

In 1993, a new study by Lyon and colleagues found radioactivity from the detonations increased the incidence of thyroid tumors 3.4 times over the expected rate among schoolchildren who were exposed to the highest doses.

That study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined the children when they were adults. They had been checked by federal researchers between 1965 and 1970. The federal researchers had not found any connection. However, the 1993 study showed 56 children had thyroid nodules. Of those, 11 were benign tumors and eight were malignancies.

The latest study was an attempt to re-examine those residents. They were in grades six through 12 in the Washington County School District in 1965. Some scientists suspect health effects may develop slowly for thyroid disease and that there may be lifelong risk.

McGeehin wrote that the CDC "has determined that no further funding is available for this study." He noted that so far, seven years of funding has been provided at a total cost of $8,049,988.