Responses to the Mancuso Report
Mancuso’s critics—including his former project manager—have consistently conceded that his data indicate an excess of bone-marrow and pancreatic cancers among the Hanford workers. But the critics contend that a carcinogen other than radiation must be involved.22
The prime basis for that contention comes from a government-sponsored investigation into the Japanese casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to official interpretations of that study, dose estimates from the Japanese bombings would indicate that similar effects surfacing in the Mancuso data were "impossible" given the reported levels of radiation at Hanford. But the bomb study itself has since come under devastating reevaluation, and it may in fact confirm rather than deny Mancuso’s conclusions.23
The study was begun in 1950 under the auspices of a high-level U.S. Government group called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). Beginning its work a full five years after the bombings, the ABCC was dominated by members of the Atomic Energy Commission. Though the board was originally composed almost entirely of Americans, the Japanese government has recently taken an increasingly important role. Essentially the ABCC undertook to reconstruct the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through computer models designed to estimate the doses received by local victims and to apply that to what could be learned about their health histories after the bombings. The study has served in part as the basis for the five-rem annual exposure standards in the workplace, and as the pace-setter for calculating all other dose levels for the general public. Moreover, it has been used as the scientific litmus test for all other radiation studies.
Unfortunately the ABCC study has been seriously flawed. Its dose estimates result from computer models built around atomic tests conducted in the U.S.; the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not monitored, and the actual doses they delivered are not precisely known. The ABCC study is considered in the scientific community to be a "high-acute dose" study, for the obvious reason that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with a massive "burst" of radiation. But the results of the ABCC study have consistently been applied to long-term exposures of low doses of radiation, which may well be an entirely different type of medical response. The Mancuso study is acknowledged as the largest of the "low-dose" studies because the workers involved were exposed over long periods of time to measured low-level exposures.
The ABCC has also been highly secretive about its data, with access given only to a select group of scientists— leading to the criticism that only those friendly to the nuclear industry have been allowed to use this seminal information. Japanese scientists have also charged that the data have been kept from them and systematically dominated by Americans who might have an interest in discouraging compensation claims from Japanese victims of the bombing.24 Indeed, in 1957 Dr. John Gofman, a leading atomic scientist and survivors tried to collect compensation."25
Additional scientific questions about the study have been raised over the nature of the populations of the two afflicted cities. The systematic analysis of what happened to them did not begin until 1950, and thus there is little base-line data about what occurred in those crucial five years after the bombs were dropped. Nonetheless, for statistical purposes the ABCC began its studies by assuming that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki populations of 1950 could serve as a viable test sample.26
But Dr. Alice Stewart has challenged that assumption. Aberrations inflicted among the survivors of the bombings had, she said, created a population that was both atypical and prone to diseases caused by bone-marrow scarring and other effects that might not turn up in the ABCC calculations. After an in-depth independent study she concluded that a more realistic appraisal of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki populations might well reveal that the radiation effects of the bombings were ten times more serious than what the ABCC was saying—and thus the entire issue of what constituted a "safe" radiation dose was very much in doubt. "The A-bomb survivors are a highly abnormal population," Stewart told us in a 1980 interview. "It seems incredible that radiation standards for workers and the general public would be based on A-bomb survivors when we now have data on normal, healthy workers from the Mancuso study."27 scientist that data were being manipulated to prepare "for the time when (missing text)
The flow of new scientific evidence seems to be going Dr. Stewart’s way. In August 1981 Iwanami Shoten of Tokyo and Basic Books of New York jointly published Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, the first comprehensive survey of the damage done by the nuclear attacks. Compiled by a team of Japanese scientists and social workers, the massive volume delineated the "irreversible injury" to human cells, tissues, and organs which still plagued bomb victims, causing a rise in deaths from leukemia and on-going suffering from other blood diseases, cataracts, genetic damage, nervous system disorders, and a general loss of disease-resistance. According to the study, which received worldwide attention, the overall toll from the bombs was far more serious than previous surveys had indicated.28 at that time a strong industry supporter, was told outright by a military
Similar revisions with specific focus on radiation damage were already being fiercely debated. In 1980 a key high-level study group—the National Academy of Sciences Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (the BEIR committee)—used ABCC data to conclude that workplace cancer risks from radiation had been overestimated by a factor of two. The committee’s chairman, Dr. Edward Radford, disagreed, arguing that exposure levels to workers should in fact be tightened by a factor of ten. Nationally known as a leading expert in the radiation field, Radford was subsequently excluded from key final BEIR committee deliberations. But in early 1981 supporters of relaxed standards in the workplace and elsewhere were given a devastating shock.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee were forced to conclude that the doses received by the people of Hiroshima thirty-five years earlier had been seriously misinterpreted. "Some of the most important data on the effects of nuclear radiation on humans may be wrong," wrote Science magazine. The amount of neutron radiation delivered by the bombs had been grossly overestimated, perhaps by a factor of ten. Thus the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have suffered cancer and other radiation side effects from doses far smaller than previously believed. That meant the radiation itself was far more deadly. "The new findings are far from welcome," one consultant told Science. All the revisions were "moving in the wrong direction" because they now indicated that low doses of radiation could kill far more people than anyone had previously thought possible—the very conclusion to which Thomas Mancuso’s work had been pointing since 1977.
The impact of the new findings was hard to overstate. "The implications are far-reaching for health regulation and nuclear power in this country in general," said David Auton, a physicist with the Defense Nuclear Agency. Standards for neutron radiation in particular might have to be tightened by a factor of ten and on crucial jobs, the nuclear industry might have to hire ten times as many people. Exposure levels for people living near nuclear power plants would have to be reevaluated, as would potential casualty statistics for a nuclear war. The new data said Dr. Arthur Upton, former director of the National Cancer Institute, greatly strengthened the argument that there is no "safe" level of exposure to radiation.29
22. George Hutchinson, Charles Land, Brian MacMahon, and Seymour Jablon, "Review of Report by Mancuso, Stewart and Kneale of Radiation Exposure of Hanford Workers," Health Physics Journal 37 (August 1979): 207-220; Ethyl S. Gilbert and Sidney Marks, "An Analysis of Mortality of Workers in a Nuclear Facility," Radiation Research 79 (1979): 122-148.
23. "New A-Bomb Studies Alter Radiation Estimates," Science 212 (May 1981) (hereafter cited as "New Studies Alter Estimates").
24. Frank Barnaby, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1977, p. 50.
25. John W. Gofman, interview, February 1981.
26. See Gilbert W. Beebe, et al., Life Span Study Report 8, Mortality Experience of Atomic Bomb Survivors, 1950-74, Technical Report TR 1-77, Radiation Effects Research Foundation.
27. Alice M.Stewart, interview, September 1980; Alice M. Stewart, "Delayed Effects of A-Bomb Radiation—a Review of Recent Mortality Rates and Risk Estimates for Five Year Survivors," submitted to the British Journal of Epidemiology, May 1981 (available through the Environmental Policy Institute, 317 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003).
22. George Hutchinson, Charles Land, Brian MacMahon, and Seymour Jablon, "Review of Report by Mancuso, Stewart and Kneale of Radiation Exposure of Hanford Workers," Health Physics Journal 37 (August 1979): 207-220; Ethyl S. Gilbert and Sidney Marks, "An Analysis of Mortality of Workers in a Nuclear Facility," Radiation Research 79 (1979): 122-148.
23. "New A-Bomb Studies Alter Radiation Estimates," Science 212 (May 1981) (hereafter cited as "New Studies Alter Estimates").
24. Frank Barnaby, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1977, p. 50.
25. John W. Gofman, interview, February 1981.
26. See Gilbert W. Beebe, et al., Life Span Study Report 8, Mortality Experience of Atomic Bomb Survivors, 1950-74, Technical Report TR 1-77, Radiation Effects Research Foundation.
27. Alice M.Stewart, interview, September 1980; Alice M. Stewart, "Delayed Effects of A-Bomb Radiation—a Review of Recent Mortality Rates and Risk Estimates for Five Year Survivors," submitted to the British Journal of Epidemiology, May 1981 (available through the Environmental Policy Institute, 317 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003).
28. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, translated by Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, Hiroshima and Nagasaki The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings (New York: Basic Books, 1981). See also, Herbert Mitgang, "Study of Atom Bomb Victims Stresses Long-Term Damage," New York Times, August 6, 1981, p. A8.
29. "New Studies Alter Estimates."