Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report

Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report PDF Author: National Academy of Sciences
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309068835
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
In 1986, officials of the US Department of Energy revealed that the Hanford Atomic Products Operations in Richland, Washington, had been releasing radioactive material, in particular iodine-131, into the environment over a period of years. This information, which confirmed the suspicions of some people in the Pacific Northwest about what they called the Hanford Reservation or just Hanford, created quite a stir. Both the US Congress and citizens of the Northwest became keenly interested in knowing whether these radiation releases had caused human health effects. They were particularly concerned about whether Hanford releases of iodine-131 had led to an increase in thyroid disease among the population of the area. In 1988, Congress ordered a study of the human health effects of exposure to the iodine-131 released from Hanford. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the study was carried out by the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center over the last decade. The study examined estimate of exposure of the thyroid and rates of thyroid disease because iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid and that organ would be the best indicator of radiation damage in the population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) to give an independent appraisal of the study methodology, results, and interpretation and of the communication of the study results to the public. Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report constitutes the response of the NRC subcommittee to that request. To respond to the charge, the NRC subcommittee felt that it needed to go beyond the specific questions addressed to it by CDC and develop a broad understanding and critique of the HTDS and the Draft Final Report. As part of those activities, the subcommittee solicited comments from outside experts and members of the public primarily in a public meeting held in Spokane, Washington, in June 1999, where 14 scientists and members of the public made formal presentations to the subcommittee about various aspects of the Draft Final Report. Other members of the public also spoke during four open-comment sessions at the meeting. In addition, efforts were made to evaluate all information materials prepared for the public and additional CDC communication plans. Information was gathered through interviews with journalists, members of concerned citizen groups in the Hanford region, members of the CDC scientific and media staff in Atlanta, and the HTDS investigators. In this summary, the main points follow the structure of our report and are presented under several headings: epidemiologic and clinical methods and data collection, dosimetry, statistical analyses, statistical power and interpretation of the study, and communication of the study results to the public. We then provide a brief synopsis of our response to the questions raised by CDC.

Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report

Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report PDF Author: National Academy of Sciences
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309068835
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
In 1986, officials of the US Department of Energy revealed that the Hanford Atomic Products Operations in Richland, Washington, had been releasing radioactive material, in particular iodine-131, into the environment over a period of years. This information, which confirmed the suspicions of some people in the Pacific Northwest about what they called the Hanford Reservation or just Hanford, created quite a stir. Both the US Congress and citizens of the Northwest became keenly interested in knowing whether these radiation releases had caused human health effects. They were particularly concerned about whether Hanford releases of iodine-131 had led to an increase in thyroid disease among the population of the area. In 1988, Congress ordered a study of the human health effects of exposure to the iodine-131 released from Hanford. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the study was carried out by the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center over the last decade. The study examined estimate of exposure of the thyroid and rates of thyroid disease because iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid and that organ would be the best indicator of radiation damage in the population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) to give an independent appraisal of the study methodology, results, and interpretation and of the communication of the study results to the public. Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report constitutes the response of the NRC subcommittee to that request. To respond to the charge, the NRC subcommittee felt that it needed to go beyond the specific questions addressed to it by CDC and develop a broad understanding and critique of the HTDS and the Draft Final Report. As part of those activities, the subcommittee solicited comments from outside experts and members of the public primarily in a public meeting held in Spokane, Washington, in June 1999, where 14 scientists and members of the public made formal presentations to the subcommittee about various aspects of the Draft Final Report. Other members of the public also spoke during four open-comment sessions at the meeting. In addition, efforts were made to evaluate all information materials prepared for the public and additional CDC communication plans. Information was gathered through interviews with journalists, members of concerned citizen groups in the Hanford region, members of the CDC scientific and media staff in Atlanta, and the HTDS investigators. In this summary, the main points follow the structure of our report and are presented under several headings: epidemiologic and clinical methods and data collection, dosimetry, statistical analyses, statistical power and interpretation of the study, and communication of the study results to the public. We then provide a brief synopsis of our response to the questions raised by CDC.

Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report

Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report PDF Author: National Academy of Sciences
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309075262
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
In 1986, officials of the US Department of Energy revealed that the Hanford Atomic Products Operations in Richland, Washington, had been releasing radioactive material, in particular iodine-131, into the environment over a period of years. This information, which confirmed the suspicions of some people in the Pacific Northwest about what they called the Hanford Reservation or just Hanford, created quite a stir. Both the US Congress and citizens of the Northwest became keenly interested in knowing whether these radiation releases had caused human health effects. They were particularly concerned about whether Hanford releases of iodine-131 had led to an increase in thyroid disease among the population of the area. In 1988, Congress ordered a study of the human health effects of exposure to the iodine-131 released from Hanford. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the study was carried out by the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center over the last decade. The study examined estimate of exposure of the thyroid and rates of thyroid disease because iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid and that organ would be the best indicator of radiation damage in the population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS-NRC) to give an independent appraisal of the study methodology, results, and interpretation and of the communication of the study results to the public. Review of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Draft Final Report constitutes the response of the NRC subcommittee to that request. To respond to the charge, the NRC subcommittee felt that it needed to go beyond the specific questions addressed to it by CDC and develop a broad understanding and critique of the HTDS and the Draft Final Report. As part of those activities, the subcommittee solicited comments from outside experts and members of the public primarily in a public meeting held in Spokane, Washington, in June 1999, where 14 scientists and members of the public made formal presentations to the subcommittee about various aspects of the Draft Final Report. Other members of the public also spoke during four open-comment sessions at the meeting. In addition, efforts were made to evaluate all information materials prepared for the public and additional CDC communication plans. Information was gathered through interviews with journalists, members of concerned citizen groups in the Hanford region, members of the CDC scientific and media staff in Atlanta, and the HTDS investigators. In this summary, the main points follow the structure of our report and are presented under several headings: epidemiologic and clinical methods and data collection, dosimetry, statistical analyses, statistical power and interpretation of the study, and communication of the study results to the public. We then provide a brief synopsis of our response to the questions raised by CDC.

The Hanford Plaintiffs

The Hanford Plaintiffs PDF Author: Trisha T. Pritikin
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700629041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book Description
For more than four decades beginning in 1944, the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State secretly blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with low-dose ionizing radiation, the byproduct of plutonium production. For those who lived in the vicinity, many of them families of Hanford workers, the consequences soon became apparent as rates of illness and death steadily climbed—despite repeated assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the facility posed no threat. Trisha T. Pritikin, who has battled a lifetime of debilitating illness to become a lawyer and advocate for her fellow “downwinders,” tells the devastating story of those who were harmed in Hanford’s wake and, seeking answers and justice, were subjected to yet more suffering. At the center of The Hanford Plaintiffs are the oral histories of twenty-four people who joined In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, the class-action suit that sought recognition of, and recompense for, the grievous injury knowingly caused by Hanford. Radioactive contamination of American communities was not uncommon during the wartime Manhattan Project, nor during the Cold War nuclear buildup that followed. Pritikin interweaves the stories of people poisoned by Hanford with a parallel account of civilians downwind of the Nevada atomic test site, who suffer from identical radiogenic diseases. Against the heartrending details of personal illness and loss and, ultimately, persistence in the face of a legal system that protects the government on all fronts and at all costs, The Hanford Plaintiffs draws a damning picture of the failure of the US Congress and the Judiciary to defend the American public and to adequately redress a catastrophic wrong. Documenting the legal, medical, and human cost of one community’s struggle for justice, this book conveys in clear and urgent terms the damage done to ordinary Americans in the name of business, progress, and patriotism.

Tortured Science

Tortured Science PDF Author: Dianne Quigley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351862707
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
The U.S.A. s nuclear weapons program has exposed workers and the public to health hazards since World War II. In the 1980s and 1990s, federal health agencies responded to new revelations about these hazards by pouring millions of dollars into research on the health impacts of radiation. In Tortured Science: Health Studies, Ethics and Nuclear Weapons in the United States , community health activists and researchers reflect on the research program for addressing the health effects of nuclear weapons production at Hanford, WA, Rocky Flats, CO, Livermore Labs, CA, and Fernald, OH. The authors describe conflicts of interest, data suppression, technical inadequacies, and other examples of how researchers failed in their social responsibility to the affected human populations. The research program s health studies did not lead to any meaningful follow-up on the major health concerns of community members, nor have they helped communities seek reparations for high radiation exposures that may have contributed to thyroid, bone, lung and other diseases. In Tortured Science , several ethicists review these health research problems. Research ethics as a discipline seeks to protect individuals and groups, obtain approval from affected communities, mitigate potential research harms, and guard against vigilance, scientific contrivance, denial, and suppression of findings. Such protections were not adequately provided in the research program on the health effects of nuclear weapons production, as critiqued in the ethical reviews. This book compels us to develop a new ethical framework for scientific research on military-industrial and other sources of contamination. Intended Audience: Public health professionals; graduates/undergraduates in public health, community health, environmental studies, epidemiology, medical anthropology, public sociology, ethics/religious studies, and science policy; government health researchers at federal health agencies, centres for ethics and bioethics (private/academic), and community health organisations; community-based researchers and environmental organisations; nuclear weapons and peace organisations.

Environmental Health Perspectives

Environmental Health Perspectives PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental health
Languages : en
Pages : 1490

Get Book

Book Description


Thyroid Cancer

Thyroid Cancer PDF Author: Leonard Wartofsky
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1592599958
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 708

Get Book

Book Description
are new to this edition. The authors provide not only the The second edition of Thyroid Cancer: A Comp- most current review of their respective areas, but also their hensive Guide to Clinical Management marks the pub- own recommendations and approach. The reader is fo- cation of a markedly updated and expanded volume that warned that in many cases these approaches, albeit rooted covers all aspects of the etiology, pathogenesis, diag- sis, initial treatment, and long-term management of all in available data, may be empiric rather than based varieties of thyroid cancer. Like the first edition, it will upon clear-cut results of well-controlled clinical t- als. Nevertheless, controversial issues are examined serve as a valuable reference source for pathologists, and evidence-based recommendations are presented endocrine surgeons, endocrinologists, nuclear medicine when available. physicians, and oncologists. However, the biggest There are updated chapters on our current state change is that the second edition is significantly enlarged and expanded to encompass important and extensive of knowledge of the molecular changes in thyroid treatments of more topics related to nuclear medicine. cancer, molecular markers, and how targeted the- pies are being developed. New therapeutic trials of Nuclear medicine physicians and procedures play a key redifferentiation agents to restore the sodium iodide role in the management of thyroid cancer patients and in symporter when lacking and more traditional che- retrospect, a comprehensive discussion of topics related therapies are discussed, with referral sources listed for to that field was somewhat lacking in the first edition.

Yelling at the Stars

Yelling at the Stars PDF Author: Michael Hertzog
Publisher: Fresh Prints Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
A family reels from the effects of WWII nuclear fallout, but this is far from the Japan of 1945. It's 2006 in Washington State, and the war just took another life. In this new release of WWII home-front historical fiction, a 12-year-old boy named Asher seems to make his dad furious no matter what he does. In hopes of getting his dad back to normal, whatever that is, he looks for a way to fix it all. But he soon finds that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, when he discovers clues suggesting his grandpa’s death may not have been as natural as he was led to believe. The secrets he uncovers might change everything, but what does a nuclear bomb from 60 years ago have to do with his grandpa and does it have something to do with why his dad hates the world? Asher, Mari, and their quirky little sisters team up to solve the mystery before Asher’s dad destroys the family. It doesn’t take long, though, for Asher to realize that trying to save someone else from their own despondency can end up putting your own health at risk. Through the support of Mari and their top secret spy sisters, Asher uncovers enraging revelations about his grandfather's death, but realizes, a little too late, that some mysteries are better left unsolved.

Plutopia

Plutopia PDF Author: Kate Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199855773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book

Book Description
While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia--they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today. An untold and profoundly important piece of Cold War history, Plutopia invites readers to consider the nuclear footprint left by the arms race and the enormous price of paying for it.

Federal Register

Federal Register PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Administrative law
Languages : en
Pages : 982

Get Book

Book Description


Medicare Coverage of Routine Screening for Thyroid Dysfunction

Medicare Coverage of Routine Screening for Thyroid Dysfunction PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309088852
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
When the Medicare program was established in 1965, it was viewed as a form of financial protection for the elderly against catastrophic medical expenses, primarily those related to hospitalization for unexpected illnesses. The first expansions to the program increased the eligible population from the retired to the disabled and to persons receiving chronic renal dialysis. It was not until 1980 that an expansion of services beyond those required "for the diagnosis or treatment of illness or injury or to improve the functioning of a malformed body member" was included in Medicare. These services, known as preventive services, are intended either to prevent disease (by vaccination) or to detect disease (by diagnostic test) before the symptoms of illness appear. A Committee was formed "to conduct a study on the addition of coverage of routine thyroid screening using a thyroid stimulating hormone test as a preventive benefit provided to Medicare beneficiaries under Title XVIII of the Social Security Act for some or all Medicare beneficiaries."