THURSDAY, Feb. 28, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Fallout from Cold War nuclear bomb tests will have caused more than 10,000 cancer deaths in the United States. But the question is, how many more?
An unpublished report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute puts the figure at 11,000 deaths among people in this country between 1951 and 2000.
But an environmental watchdog group believes the death toll is closer to 15,000, and it bases that claim on a compilation of evidence, including the government report. Radiation from the above-ground blasts may ultimately be responsible for as many as 80,000 cancer cases -- including tumors of the blood, thyroid gland, and other organs -- in Americans born during that period, according to the group, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
Maps show fallout from A-bomb testing -- much of which occurred in Nevada -- swept across virtually the entire United States, with the densest exposures occurring generally in the West and Midwest.
Bernadette Burden, a spokeswoman for the CDC, which is preparing the report, said the full document will be released "soon," but couldn't be more specific. However, the agency did prepare an executive summary of the work last August.
That document states that 11,000 cancer deaths among people who lived in the United States between 1951 and 2000 were the result of fallout, along with another 11,000 nonfatal cases. Ten percent of the exposure deaths were the result of leukemia, which may claim another 550 lives, the summary says.
The inquiry was begun in 1998 at the urging of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). Some of its findings, which are a year overdue, were disclosed today by USA Today, which puts the death toll from fallout at 15,000. Figures and maps were also released today by the Energy and Environmental Research, which is located in Takoma Park, Md.
In 1997, the National Cancer Institute issued a report tying thyroid cancer to fallout from Nevada bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. The explosion led to a rain of radioactive Iodine-131 across mid-America, where it was taken up by grass. Cows ate the shoots, incorporating the toxic element into their milk, which people drank.
Above-ground atomic testing was banned in 1963. But between 1945 and then the United States conducted 210 such weapons tests both at home and in the Pacific Ocean, according to documents on the state of Utah's Web site. Nearly 100 of those blasts occurred at the Nevada Test Site, a 1,350 square-mile proving ground near Las Vegas.
In addition to American weapons, the Soviet Union and Great Britain also performed above-ground nuclear tests that scattered fallout over the earth.
"We applaud the fact that the United States government has been honest enough to say that it has harmed its own people, though it did so only under prolonged pressure from the people and some of its elected representatives," Lisa Ledwidge, a biologist at IEER, said in a statement Thursday. "It is the only nuclear-weapon state to have done so."
Joseph Lynn Lyon, a physician at the University of Utah who has studied the health effects of nuclear fallout, called the cancer figures "believable" and said "there's no question" that A-bomb tests caused human disease.
Bomb radiation levels have all but evaporated since the 1960s, and lingering fallout causes only a tiny fraction of exposures to radioactive elements, such as radon, generated in nature and by people.
Still, Lyon said, it's possible some adults may still be suffering thyroid cancers linked to weapons tests. However, what to do about the problem isn't clear. In the wake of the 1997 cancer institute report, there was a brief movement in some areas to screen people for the tumors. But the National Academy of Sciences eventually deemed that effort ineffective.
What To Do
For more on the fallout report, visit the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
To learn more about radiation from A-bomb tests, check out the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.
