--ratitor

. . . On rare occasion, there has been official acknowledgement of the deep-seated political motivations for understating the potential health effects of low-level radiation. For example, William H. Taft, a U.S. State Department attorney, said in 1981:

The mistaken impression [that low-level radiation is hazardous] has the potential to be seriously damaging to every aspect of the Department of Defense's nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion programs. . . . It could adversely affect our relations with our European allies.[1]

This book offers reason to suspect that the lethal nature of low-level radiation is no "mistaken impression." The scale of potential damage was foreseen by Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling, and Andrei Sakharov, and was later supported by warnings from John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin, Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Morgan, Carl Johnson and Ernest Sternglass.

We believe that the cumulative magnitude of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing may explain what has hitherto been a great epidemiological mystery, as described in Chapter Seven. In the 1950-1965 period, mortality statistics inexplicably stopped getting better, after decades of improvement going back to the discovery of antisepsis early in the 19th century. During this period, the volume of fission products released into the atmosphere was equivalent to the explosion of some 40,000 Hiroshirna bombs, according to a thorough examination of seismic records conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council. This terrifying figure was known to the leaders of the Soviet Union, who were responsible for two-thirds of the total yield (most of which occurred in 1961 and 1962), and to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Although the magnitude of this nuclear orgy was not publicized at the time, it led to the U.S.-Soviet agreement to ban atmospheric bomb tests in 1963, after which mortality rates resumed their annual, though somewhat diminished, improvement. . . .

Our findings of a supralinear effect also agree with similar findings for cancer mortality from exposures to low-level radiation made by four eminent authorities: Dr. John Gofman, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, Dr. Thomas Mancuso and Dr. Alice Stewart. All four scientists worked at various times for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission or Department of Energy. All four concluded that the dose-response relationship was supralinear, which means that there is no level of radiation low enough to be deemed "safe". The government terminated the services of all four when they each, independently, came up with what Dr. Gofman has called the "wrong" answer--that is, the opposite of what the AEC wanted to hear.

The supralinear dose-response for infant mortality may apply to all deaths from immune-system damage caused by radiation-induced free radicals (the so-called "Petkau effect" which is discussed in the methodological appendix). This generalization is supported by a projection of the current trend in the U.S. age-adjusted mortality rates (see Chapter Seven). This projection suggests that without fundamental change, the death rates of all age groups will begin to rise in the 21st century, cancelling out previous advances in longevity.

Since the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945, considerable research has focused on the health effects of radiation. Early studies examined the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Subsequent laboratory experiments studied analogous kinds of whole-body irradiation. The conventional wisdom from this substantial body of research is that high doses of radiation caused by bomb blasts can seriously injure human health, but that small doses of radioactive fallout, often called "low-level" radiation, do little harm.

There is now reason to fear that low-level radiation from fallout and from nuclear reactors may have done far more damage to humans and other living things than previously thought, and that continued operation of civilian and military nuclear reactors may do irreversible harm to future generations as well.

The chief findings in this book revolve around statistical estimates of excess deaths that have never before been part of the public debate on the dangers of low-level radiation. They may shock the general reader, because there has been a sustained effort to withhold official data from the public, as discussed in Chapter Six.

Nuclear physicists realized as early as 1943 that fission products released into the atmosphere could enter into the food chain, and, when ingested, could accelerate the deaths of millions of persons worldwide. As related in Chapter Seven, Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov calculated in 1958 that millions of people would die prematurely from the ingestion of fission products resulting from fallout from atmospheric bomb tests.

Today we are in a position to review the official U.S. mortality statistics for nearly nine decades of the twentieth century, to find that the chilling predictions of Pauling and Sakharov may have been fulfilled not only during the period of atmospheric bomb tests but after every major accidental release of nuclear fission products.

Most previous studies of the health effects of low-level radiation were based on theoretical extrapolations of how many cancer deaths can be expected from exposure to high-level radiation, taken from the experience of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. In this book, we take a completely different, pragmatic approach, guided by the pioneering work of radiation physicist Ernest Sternglass and physician and epidemiologist Carl Johnson. We analyze the mortality data collected from official death certificates filed in the wake of large radiation fallouts. In this way we can estimate the dose response to low-level radiation after the fact, rather than as a matter of theoretical speculation.

As statisticians, we define an "excess" number of deaths at any time and place as the difference between the number of deaths actually observed and the number that would be expected based on national norms, when that difference is too great to be attributed to chance (as detailed in the methodological appendix). We have found that releases of low-level radiation from nuclear power and weapons plant reactors have consistently been followed by large numbers of "excess" deaths.

Chapter Two deals with perhaps our most startling discovery, that radiation from the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which reached the U.S. early in May of 1986, was followed almost immediately by an extraordinary force of mortality, amounting to perhaps 40,000 excess deaths in the summer months, especially in the month of May. The acceleration in deaths particularly affected the very young, the very old, and those suffering from infectious diseases such as AIDS, suggesting that the ingestion of Chernobyl fission products had an immediate adverse impact on those with vulnerable immune systems.

The Chernobyl disaster released so large a volume of fission products into the atmosphere so quickly that its immediate effects, though thousands of miles from the source, were revealed by the analysis of the official monthly mortality reports of two nations that make such data publicly available--the U.S. and West Germany.

Our results were unexpected, but when we went back to examine the mortality data associated with previous large nuclear releases, we found the same pattern of excess deaths among the very young and very old. We found immediate increases in infant mortality and in total deaths (primarily comprising older persons), which were followed later by annual increases in excess cancer deaths. These excess deaths may be linked to damaged immune systems from the ingestion of fission products: in particular, radioactive iodine, which damages fetal thyroids, and radioactive strontium, which concentrates in the bone marrow.

This book can be viewed as an epidemiological "whodunnit," with the suspect revealed by Chernobyl in 1986, and the web of circumstantial evidence traced back to 1945.

Deadly Deceit has two major parts. The first part (Chapters Two through Six) presents our findings from large databases of official measures of radiation and of mortality. (The development of these databases is described in the afterword.) In the first part, statistical tests identify significant increases in mortality, controlling for alternative explanations with geographic and temporal comparison groups, and, on occasion, with tests of multiple variables.

The second part of the book (Chapters Seven through Ten) considers the implications of the case study findings, pointing the way for future studies by offering some speculative hypotheses that grow out of the case study findings.

Much of the most telling information this book offers is in its charts, which allow the reader to visualize the findings without going through the huge masses of tabular data on which they are based. We have made the detailed data available to those who are interested. One notable use of our related databases was a report by Greenpeace USA that demonstrated the toxicity of the Mississippi River. Greenpeace found that from 1968 to 1983 there were some 66,000 excess deaths in the counties bordering the river, a figure greater than the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. In this book, we found similarly disturbing clusters of excess deaths associated with radiation releases. A sampling follows.

Between 50,000 and 100,000 excess deaths occurred after releases from accidents at the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility in 1970 and again at Three Mile Island in 1979. The 1970 Savannah River reactor rod meltdowns were revealed in Congressional hearings held by Senator Glenn (D-Ohio), after 18 years of official concealment. Our discussion in Chapter Four of significant mortality increases in South Carolina and neighboring southern states following the 1970 Savannah River accidents is the first such analysis published. Among the many causes for the increased mortality, we found extraordinary increases in infant deaths from birth defects. The government claims that no radiation was released as a result of the accidents, yet because the Savannah River facility is under military control, accurate emissions data are not publicly available. The significant increases in excess deaths suggest a substantial release may in fact have occurred.

The Brookhaven National Laboratory has documented hundreds, if not thousands, of "routine" and accidental civilian reactor releases since the mid-Sixties, the largest of which occurred at Three Mile Island in 1979. Chapter Five describes our findings of significant mortality increases following the accident, particularly in the ten-county area closest to the stricken reactor. As in the Savannah River case, excess infant deaths from birth defects increased significantly after the Three Mile Island accident, as did excess deaths from child cancer, lung cancer, heart diseases, and other causes.

Chapter Six provides evidence of official concealment and falsification of key data on radiation and its health effects, indicating why these findings have never been made public before. On rare occasion, there has been official acknowledgement of the deep-seated political motivations for understating the potential health effects of low-level radiation. For example, William H. Taft, a U.S. State Department attorney, said in 1981:

The mistaken impression [that low-level radiation is hazardous] has the potential to be seriously damaging to every aspect of the Department of Defense's nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion programs. . . . It could adversely affect our relations with our European allies.[1]

This book offers reason to suspect that the lethal nature of low-level radiation is no "mistaken impression." The scale of potential damage was foreseen by Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling, and Andrei Sakharov, and was later supported by warnings from John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin, Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Morgan, Carl Johnson and Ernest Sternglass.

We believe that the cumulative magnitude of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing may explain what has hitherto been a great epidemiological mystery, as described in Chapter Seven. In the 1950-1965 period, mortality statistics inexplicably stopped getting better, after decades of improvement going back to the discovery of antisepsis early in the 19th century. During this period, the volume of fission products released into the atmosphere was equivalent to the explosion of some 40,000 Hiroshirna bombs, according to a thorough examination of seismic records conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council. This terrifying figure was known to the leaders of the Soviet Union, who were responsible for two-thirds of the total yield (most of which occurred in 1961 and 1962), and to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Although the magnitude of this nuclear orgy was not publicized at the time, it led to the U.S.-Soviet agreement to ban atmospheric bomb tests in 1963, after which mortality rates resumed their annual, though somewhat diminished, improvement.

Chapter Seven also offers disturbing evidence that many members of the baby-boom generation, who were born into the nuclear age, sustained an observable degree of immune-system damage. The successive cohorts of persons born since 1945, who were exposed to ingested fission products in utero, at birth, or in early childhood, are now registering ominous increases in their mortality rates. These generations are disproportionately affected by a wide range of immune deficiency diseases, including AIDS, Chronic Epstein Barr Virus (known as "yuppie influenza" or "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome") and many others.

Chapter Ten explores a heretical hypothesis, first advanced by radiation physicists Ernest Sternglass and Jens Scheer, that may explain why AIDS first emerged in the wetlands of Africa in 1980. These areas of high rainfall received the heaviest fallout during the years of atmospheric bomb tests, as indicated by United Nations surveys taken at the end of the 1950s. The surveys showed human bones there had the world's highest concentrations of radioactive strontium-90. The hypothesis links the damaged immune systems of persons reaching their peak years of sexual activity in the 1980s to viruses mutated by radiation, and to dietary factors such as calcium intake. Sternglass and Scheer cite the extraordinary case of the West Indies island of Trinidad, which has a population of largely African and Asian origin, and where AIDS is found only among people of African origin and not at all among those of Asian descent. This discrepancy, Sternglass and Scheer propose, may be due to the dominance of calcium-rich fish and rice in the Asian diet, which offsets the tendency for radioactive strontium (which has a chemical structure similar to calcium) to concentrate in their bones.

Chapter Nine examines the potential consequences of huge emissions from the Millstone reactor in Connecticut in 1975, the second largest civilian accident after Three Mile Island. These emissions may have set off a cancer epidemic centered in the two neighboring counties of Middlesex and New London that still continues. In our effort to investigate this epidemic at the local level, we found that publication of cancer mortality data by township, routinely available from the Connecticut Department of Health Services since the 1930s, was terminated in 1977. We think that post-1976 mortality and morbidity data for the towns close to the Millstone reactors may also throw light on the outbreak of Lyme disease, first reported in the area near Millstone during the fall of 1975.

An equally startling hypothesis is posed in Chapter Eight, where we suggest that fresh milk from dairy farms near nuclear reactors may have contributed, along with increasing poverty and other causes, to deteriorating infant mortality in certain urban areas over the past two decades.

This hypothesis was suggested to us by statistics related to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's unprecedented closing of the Peach Bottom reactors on the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland on March 31, 1987 because of operator negligence going back to 1974. The reactors had a long record of excessive releases of the short-lived radioactive element iodine-131. The Peach Bottom reactors are located in one of the nation's most productive dairy farming areas, which supplies fresh milk to the entire Mid-Atlantic area, including the cities of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. After Peach Bottom was closed, in the summer of 1987 infant mortality in Washington, D.C. plunged to the best rates in some 20 years.

We then found a statistically significant correlation between changes in infant mortality over the past two decades and regional risks of exposure to milk contaminated from civilian reactor emissions since 1974. The fourteen states in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions with the greatest risk of exposure to contaminated milk also had the worst infant mortality performance. Analyzing these data, we found that while the exposure risk of eight Midwest states was 440 times greater than that of three northern New England states, the corresponding infant mortality performance was only ten percent worse. This evidence suggests that the dose-response is "supralinear" rather than linear, which means that infant mortality rises more rapidly at low doses.

Another example of the supralinear relationship was offered in the wake of Chernobyl. The June 1986 increase in infant deaths over June 1985 in the U.S. was a full ten percent of the increase in West Germany's Baden-Wurttemberg province, even though U.S. radiation levels were only one-hundredth to one-thousandth as great.

This crucial evidence supports the 1972 laboratory findings of Dr. Abram Petkau, a Canadian radiation biologist, on the dangerous effects of "free radicals" created by exposure to low-level radiation. Free radicals are charged particles that can penetrate and destroy the blood cells of the immune system, especially at low-levels of radiation.

Our findings of a supralinear effect also agree with similar findings for cancer mortality from exposures to low-level radiation made by four eminent authorities: Dr. John Gofman, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, Dr. Thomas Mancuso and Dr. Alice Stewart. All four scientists worked at various times for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission or Department of Energy. All four concluded that the dose-response relationship was supralinear, which means that there is no level of radiation low enough to be deemed "safe". The government terminated the services of all four when they each, independently, came up with what Dr. Gofman has called the "wrong" answer--that is, the opposite of what the AEC wanted to hear.

The supralinear dose-response for infant mortality may apply to all deaths from immune-system damage caused by radiation-induced free radicals (the so-called "Petkau effect" which is discussed in the methodological appendix). This generalization is supported by a projection of the current trend in the U.S. age-adjusted mortality rates (see Chapter Seven). This projection suggests that without fundamental change, the death rates of all age groups will begin to rise in the 21st century, cancelling out previous advances in longevity.

One striking number should be mentioned here: The statistical probability is less than one in one million that during the summer following the Chernobyl accident the excess deaths observed in the U.S. were due to chance. Equally improbable were the excess deaths observed in West Germany during the same time period. And, as related in Chapter Three, ornithologist David DeSante found at the same time that the number of newly-hatched land birds counted by the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in California in the late spring and summer of 1986 dropped 62 percent below the average of the preceding decade. The probability that the simultaneous summertime mortality peaks in the U.S., West Germany, and among birds are unrelated random events can be expressed mathematically as one out of 10 raised to the 30th power, that is, one out of:

Even so, we acknowledge that something other than radiation or chance may have caused the unusual mortality phenomena in the summer of 1986, as well as the other significant mortality increases associated with radiation releases described in this book. Our evidence is largely statistical and as such not one-hundred percent conclusive, but these significant statistics cannot be ignored. This book is a challenge to the scientific community to identify plausible alternative explanations.

The charges made here are too important to be left to the experts for resolution. Continued reliance on nuclear technologies may pose an on-going threat to life on earth. The potential danger warrants the widest possible audience and public debate. As the final chapter indicates, it is not too late to eliminate the chief sources of radioactive pollution. We can cite as hopeful examples Wyoming and Montana, two states far from nuclear emissions where infant mortality rates are among the best anywhere in the world today.

_________________________

1. Brian Jacobs, "The politics of radiation: when public health and the nuclear industry collide." Greenpeace, July-August, 1988, p. 7.

The book is the product of a collective effort on the part of consultants to, and the analysts and staff of, Public Data Access, Inc., including Ayse Cahn, Wendy Chiang, Bill McDonnell, Joseph Mangano, Chinnah Mithrasekaran, David Tanzer, Ken E. Tanzer, Ken J. Tanzer, Eben Weitzman, and Ellen Davidson who contributed their talents to the research and development of the databases that provided the radiation and mortality information used throughout the book.

Deadly Deceit benefited greatly from the journalistic skills of Kate Millpointer, whose chapter "Silent Summer" invokes a chilling reminder of Rachel Carson's predictions made 25 years ago in "Silent Spring," and from the editorial skills of Sybil Wong, Philip Friedman and Michael Tanzer, who helped with the early drafts of the manuscript. Thanks also go to John Oakes and Dan Simon of Four Walls Eight Windows for publishing the book.

We are grateful for the generous financial support of the CS Fund, Deer Creek Foundation, Environmental Research Foundation, W. H. and Carol Ferry, Friedson Philanthropic Funds, Fund for Investigative Journalism, John I. Kennedy, Gloria White McNally, National Community Funds, Public Concern Foundation, Alexander C. Stewart, and the Youth Project. We also wish to acknowledge the help of the Council on Economic Priorities and the Institute for Policy Studies, which have sponsored portions of our environmental research over the past four years.

Special thanks go to the Reverend Benjamin Chavis and Charles Lee of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (CJR), which has sponsored the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) and its efforts to analyze the way in which low-level radiation disproportionately affects low-income minority groups. In late 1988, we joined efforts with CRJ in creating the RPHP in order to extend our studies of the health effects of nuclear releases, and to stimulate public debate on these controversial issues.

                          JAY M. GOULD
                          Director

                          BENJAMIN A. GOLDMAN
                          Associate Director

                          Radiation and Public Health Project
                          New York, December 1989

                                                                                          yer friendly neighborhood ratman