Cloud hovers over nuke fallout

Benjamin Grove

Monday, March 2, 1998 | 10 a.m.

Ardath Webster vividly remembers the atomic bomb tests that knocked her 6-year-old body out of bed in 1951. Webster's father was an officer at the U.S. Air Force base in Indian Springs, and the family lived on a ranch a mile away.

"My dad would open the windows and nail a heavy Army blanket over them, so that when the blast hit our house and broke out all the windows, we wouldn't be hit by all the shards," said Webster, now 53. "The next day my mother would send us outside to play and we would look up at the mushroom cloud."

Now Webster wants to know the future effects the bomb blasts will have on her health. The Las Vegan said her father died of esophagus cancer. She, too, has developed a thyroid disease.

"I would like to know how many times I was exposed," Webster said. "Which blasts had the I-131 (radioactive iodine) in it? If you don't know how many times you've been exposed, you don't know what to expect."

Above-ground nuclear weapons tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, roughly 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and Nellis Air Force Range, from 1951 to 1963. President George Bush halted all testing, including underground, in 1992.

Since the tests were conducted, Nevadans like Webster and people across the country have wondered how the testing affected their health and the environment.

Some -- experts are still haggling over how many -- developed thyroid cancer, which attacks the gland in the throat that regulates cells in the body and affects growth.

Many have accused the government of hiding information.

Then last August, the National Cancer Institute released a report indicating bomb tests exposed millions of children across the country as far as the East Coast to radioactive iodine, increasing their risk of thyroid cancer. The report said 10,000 to 75,000 could develop the disease.

The technical, wordy report is about a half-inch think, complete with complex equations and accompanied by a 100,000-page index. So Congress hurriedly commissioned an 18-member panel of scientists, physicians and other experts from around the country to study how to put easily-understood information in the public's hands.

Panel members hope to make recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by June. But after a six-hour meeting at the St. Tropez Hotel in Las Vegas Saturday, panel members made no firm recommendations, saying only that their job would not be easy.

"There is not a clear answer," said Steven Simon, a panel leader. "It's a comprehensive report that covers physics, weapons design, ecology, health effects. We're studying something very broad."

Other panelists said they would likely be synthesizing and summarizing the report in different ways for different people. For instance, physicians may want the information in a different form than average citizens.

Panalists spent much of the meeting discussing how to tell people what their risk for thyroid cancer is depending on a variety of factors, including where and when they grew up, their diet, and gender.

Females are more likely to develop thyroid cancer, as are people who grew up in the West during the 1950s and people who drank a lot of milk, a good vehicle for radioactive iodine.

"On the one hand, we don't want to create mass hysteria, but on the other hand we don't want to minimize this for people who fear they may have been irradiated," said panelist Ernest Mazzaferrri, a professor and physician from Ohio State University.

Besides Webster, only one other thyroid disease victim showed up for the meeting, although it was designed for the panel to receive public input.

Berkeley, Calif., attorney Trisha Thompson Pritikin has been an activist against nuclear fallout since 1988, when doctors told her she had serious hypothyroidism and osteonecrosis, which has weakened her knees and made walking difficult.

Pritikin said she was raised in Richland, Wash., about 10 miles from Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where her father, Perry Thompson, worked as an engineer. She said her father died of thyroid cancer two years ago, deeply depressed that his profession subjected his family to dangerous fallout.

"He also died of a broken heart because his supervisors, those who were running the plant, assured him there was no harm," Pritikin said. "They lied."

Pritikin said that only a few weeks ago she learned that her hometown also was subjected to Nevada Test Site radiation.

"I had no idea I was a Nevada Test Site person, too," she said. "I have been dealing with Hanford so long that this was just another bit of bad news."

Pritikin said she was among thousands of plaintiffs in the massive lawsuit against the contractors who ran the Hanford plant, scheduled for trial next year.

Pritikin said the panel should recommend that the government make available profiles that explain how at-risk people are to thyroid cancer and other diseases based on their personal histories.

"People need to know that they need to get their thyroid checked," she said.