Feds Yank Funding For Study On Thyroid Cancer In Downwinders (UT, NV)

[hatrack]

"The federal government, after already spending $8 million on the project, has yanked funding for a study of possible connections between thyroid health effects and the radioactive fallout that hit southern Utah and nearby areas of Nevada decades ago. The study has rechecked about 1,300 of 4,000 former students who lived in southwestern Utah and eastern Nevada, plus a control group of Arizona residents.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, ended the program. "CDC does not have the financial resources available to continue the project," agency spokesman John Florence told the Deseret Morning News. "It's a funding issue." Notification of the study's halt came in a March 21 letter from Michael A. McGeehin, director of the CDC Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects, to Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, a University of Utah researcher who has been heading the investigation.

Lyon said he is loath to use the word cover-up, but it seems the federal government does not want to know about health effects of fallout on American citizens. Still, "That's the only interpretation I can place on it," he said. Asked how often the CDC pulls funding in the middle of a major study, Lyon said, "I've never known it to happen before. I haven't done a survey there, but it's the first time I've heard" about such a thing happening.

Lyon's earlier studies, beginning in 1977, demonstrated that fallout from open-air nuclear bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site caused cancer downwind. After his report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 1979 and another review showed excess leukemia deaths, Congress passed a fallout compensation measure. In 1993, a new study by Lyon and colleagues found radioactivity from the detonations increased the incidence of thyroid tumors 3.4 times over the expected rate among schoolchildren who were exposed to the highest doses."

EDIT

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600122011,00.html

[NVMojo]

1. Both of my kids' grandparents on their dad's side grew up in Idaho

during this period of time and both are dead, within two years of each other, one from a weird form of luekemia and the other from lung cancer and she never smoked, neither did the husband.

They are killing this because there is movement to start up nuclear testing again at the test site, it's a repug thing...

[NVMojo]

2. Utahns need to boot Bennett!!

Matheson moves to block Nevada nuclear tests

March 9, 2005

WASHINGTON — Rep. Jim Matheson is getting ready to butt heads with the White House over a resumption of nuclear weapons testing.
On Wednesday, Matheson, D-Utah, reintroduced legislation that impedes efforts to resume nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site, where tests during the 1950s and 1960s led to the deaths of thousands of downwinders, including Matheson's father, former Utah Gov. Scott Matheson.
"Like thousands of Utah families, I am painfully aware of the federal government's failure to protect its citizens from the dangers of radioactive fallout created during atomic testing in Nevada," Matheson said. "The federal government said we were safe. The federal government knew we were at risk. I will not stand by and let the government take Utah families down that path again."
Matheson originally introduced the "Safety for Americans from Nuclear Weapons Testing Act" in 2004 after funds were appropriated to study development of two new types of nuclear weapons and to shorten the time needed for test site readiness.

Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, has announced plans to reintroduce companion legislation in the Senate.
Bipartisan efforts in the House and Senate last year resulted in much of the proposed funding for nuclear weapons development being gutted from the 2005 Department of Energy budget.
The president's 2006 budget includes $8.5 million in both the DOE and the Department of Defense budgets to continue studying the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, or "bunker-buster" weapon.

more...

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600117558,00.html