Deseret News
Tuesday, July 26, 1994

FEDERAL HELP SOUGHT FOR "GUINEA PIGS"

S.L. County residents may be at risk, radiation panel told.
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By Lee Davidson, Washington Correspondent

Maybe the government didn't set out to make Utahns medical guinea pigs with its atomic bomb tests, but a presidential commission was told Monday that's what they became.

That may include Salt Lake County residents - who, it turns out, received higher doses of radiation from atomic tests than some southern Utah counties where cancer victims are eligible for government compensation.

Discussion of that came as activists asked President Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to expand its scope to also look at questions about atomic tests, which they say continuing government secrecy has prevented answering.

Clinton created that committee more to look at recently revealed medical radiation experiments on unwitting victims, such as feeding plutonium to mental patients. But it was also ordered to study some weapons tests, such as some at Dugway Proving Ground to develop arms to spread radioactive dust to the winds.

Activists openly hoped any new study of atomic tests might lead to changes in a 4-year-old program to compensate downwind cancer victims and uranium miners. The program has denied half the claims so far from people who believe they are victims.

"I'm not here to convince you that they knew the Nevada tests were done for the purpose of exposing downwind populations for medical study. Obviously, that was not the case," said Janet Gordon, president of Citizen's Call, which represents downwind cancer victims of atomic testing.

"What we had were experiments of opportunity," she said. The experiments came as a side-effect of bomb development and included testing schoolchildren for thyroid changes because of radioactive iodine from fallout.

She said many documents about such medical monitoring and tests are still secret, and she hopes the panel can get them. "Why can't we find out what's happening to us?"

Gordon said even though the government told Utah residents the tests were safe, it likely knew fallout was dangerous because of experiences in Japan and because experiments only occurred when the wind was blowing toward Utah.

Even though they were supposedly safe, if the wind shifted toward Los Angeles or Las Vegas or San Francisco or Phoenix, the test would be canceled," she said.

If the government didn't know the tests were dangerous early on, she said it should have quickly realized it when "the sheep were dying by the thousands . . . when people were getting sick and their hair was falling out. My brother's did. He died of pancreatic cancer when he was 26."

And such problems may not have been confined to southern Utah.

Duncan C. Thomas, presidential committee member and director of the biostatistics division at the University of Southern California, said studies have shown that Salt Lake County had higher radiation levels than such counties as Sevier, Beaver and Piute - although he said levels were low in all those areas.

But victims of some types of cancer in Sevier, Beaver and Piute are eligible for government compensation - while those in Salt Lake County are not. "They (Congress) excluded Salt Lake County for obvious reasons - for what the bill would be," Thomas said.

Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall - who represented many downwinders as an attorney - told the committee he hoped its work would help Congress to decide to re-evaluate its 4-year-old downwinder compensation program next year.

"I wouldn't describe the payments as generous," he said. "It's something." But he complained half of all claims have been denied.

And he said uranium miners - whom former Atomic Energy Commission members knew would likely get sick but did not warn them - are having an especially tough time. Records needed to prove employment for compensation often no longer exist.