Saturday, March 06, 1999
Larger study looks at Fernald
Health risks can be better assessed and measured
BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HARRISON — Government scientists suspect that workers who processed uranium at Fernald during the Cold War have a higher risk than the general population of developing kidney disease and cancer.
But they cannot prove it ... yet.
So the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will take a look at the causes of death reported among former Fernald workers who died before the end of 1996.
They will update the findings of an earlier look at workers who died prior to 1989 — and anticipate finding additional elevated numbers of deaths because of lung and stomach cancers.
And, thanks to a similar mortality study of workers at Fernald's “sister site,” the former Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in Missouri, scientists will be on the lookout for higher-than-expected numbers of cases of kidney disease and kidney cancer.
“It's basically telling us where to look. ... We know the questions to ask” at Fernald, based on what was found at Mallinckrodt, said Barbara Grajewski, chief of the epidemiology section in NIOSH's health-related energy research branch, at a meeting of the Fernald Health Effects Subcommittee here this week.
The Fernald mortality study update, a $434,000 effort, should be completed in September 2000.
Scientists rarely are able to draw direct comparisons among the scattered sites of the 1940s and '50s atomic weapons complex. Facilities often used unique processes, each designed to accomplish a single piece of weapons production.
But Fernald and Mallinckrodt performed essentially the same tasks: refining high-grade uranium for use in nuclear weapons. So their workers risked the same types of chemical and radiological exposures and, subsequently, are likely to have developed the same kinds of disease, Ms. Grajewski said.
“The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow here is that maybe, one day, we can combine the data,” she said.
With a larger number of people involved in the study — 2,514 Mallinckrodt workers plus 4,014 from Fernald — its conclusions become more scientifically valid.
To former Fernald workers, the payoff could be getting quicker answers to their longstanding health concerns. The scientific data is expected to back up their anecdotal knowledge that men at “ground zero” of the Cold War — weapons production plants — got sick and died as a result of their exposures.
And the scientific link between exposures and specific diseases could provide better safety guidelines for people who still work with radiation. These include nuclear power industry workers as well as airline employees, who get a higher dose of atmospheric radiation.
Until studies such as the ones at Fernald and Mallinckrodt are complete, government scientists must base their health standards on the only radiation exposure data available: information gathered from survivors of the atom bombs dropped in Japan at the end of World War II.
But that data does not directly apply because bomb survivors faced a short-term, massive dose rather than the long-term, low-dose radiation exposure of plant workers.
“There are still people who are radiation workers in the United States,” Ms. Grajewski said. “This information can help them.”
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