Fallout link to thyroid cancer gets boost

Almost anyone diagnosed with thyroid cancer who was a child in the United States during open-air nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, and drank fresh milk from stores or farms, could make a case that development of the disease likely was influenced by radioactive fallout.

That's the belief of F. Owen Hoffman, one of the authors of a new report summarizing impacts of fallout on thyroid cancer. The report is "Thyroid Doses and Risk of Thyroid Cancer from Exposure to I-131 from the Nevada Test Site," prepared by SENES Oak Ridge Inc., consultants based in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

It calculates risks, breaking out several areas throughout the country and analyzing the danger of thyroid cancer to people born in certain years.

Federal fallout compensation is available only to people who lived in selected counties. But as documented years ago, fallout from open-air nuclear blasts at the test site fell throughout the country.

The National Institutes of Health has set up a fallout risk calculator on the Internet, which is useful for figuring exposure and risk. The program asks those using it for facts such as age, gender and residency.

SENES' study makes some of the same calculations for several groups of citizens, with birth year, gender and location playing important roles. It calculates risks based on these factors and shows estimates about exposure.

The new report's risk calculator is updated in a way that is similar to an improvement the NIH plans for its online site, according to the study.

"Virtually all 160 million Americans who lived in the continental U.S. during the nuclear testing period were exposed to I-131," the report says.

Radioactive Iodine 131 would churn into the air with a blast's fireball. It would travel in clouds and drop as fallout. Cattle eating contaminated grass would pass along I-131 in their milk, and the material tended to accumulate in thyroid glands of people who drank milk.

The federal government has laws governing compensation to atomic workers who were exposed to radiation and developed cancer.

For compensation, there must be at least a 1 percent chance that the baseline risk of thyroid cancer has doubled for the atomic worker, Hoffman, president and director of SENES, said when contacted by the Deseret Morning News. The baseline represents the risk to unexposed people of the same age, gender and other attributes.

Almost anyone in the United States who was "unfortunate enough to have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a fairly rare disease, would qualify (for compensation) regardless of location of residence throughout the 3,090 counties of the USA," Hoffman said in an e-mail response.