Monticello demands answers on uranium

MONTICELLO — Conversation overheard here Wednesday:

Craig Leavitt: "They're waiting for us to die."

Jackie Steele: "And it's working."

That's the pessimistic response among some residents to a just-released Utah Department of Health report about whether Monticello residents have an elevated risk of cancer after years of exposure to the town's former uranium mill.

Inconclusive without more study was the gist of the report, unveiled Wednesday night at a town meeting that drew about 100 current and former residents, as well as more than a dozen representatives from federal and state health and environmental agencies.

The town, led by a small grass-roots group called the Victims of Mill Tailings Exposure, is hoping to convince the federal government that Monticello's past history of exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals from the uranium mill makes it eligible for a federally funded early-detection cancer screening clinic and a cancer treatment facility.

But first the town must prove that its stories of cancer after cancer in nearly every house in town add up to an "elevated" cancer risk compared to Utah as a whole, and is not due to just random chance.

The UDOH report, compiled by its office of epidemiology, concluded that the incidence of cancers in zip code 84535 is "not statistically significant." However, the report cautioned that the health department's study is just preliminary and did not include cancers diagnosed prior to 1973, the year the Utah Cancer Registry began, and that it also didn't include cases diagnosed outside Utah.

'I want to assure you that this is just a first step," said the report's co-author, Juliana Grant, who acknowledged that the failure to provide a definitive answer is frustrating to both scientists and residents. Grant's voice cracked as she told the community she knew that "all of you live with the face of cancer each day. We get to go back to Salt Lake and we don't live with this every day." But, she said, the department is "committed to doing the best we can" to help the town.

The town meeting was both low key and emotional. Fritz Pipkin, 58, who was diagnosed with leukemia three years ago, told the panel of federal experts that "I wish the people of this community who passed away could walk through that door. They would shame the federal government for putting that mill over the hill. We need some help, and we're not going to sit back and wait."

According to the report, more studies are needed to validate the numbers and names of cancer cases provided by VMTE based on its 2005 health survey of current and former residents. VMTE's list includes many names of people diagnosed prior to the Cancer Registry, as well as people who were diagnosed outside Utah.

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