February 15, 2001
Cancer gave Utahn a healthy mistrust
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,250011091,00.html
By Elaine Jarvik
Deseret News staff writer

 She has no heartbreaking story about being bundled into the family Chevy to watch bombs explode across the desert sky. When the government was conducting nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the mid-1950s " showering atomic dust on unsuspecting southern Utahns " Mary Dickson was living 300 miles comfortably to the north, taking her first baby steps at her parents home in Salt Lake County.

Mary Dickson's "Downwinders All" details the difficulty of tracking down the causes of cancer.
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

 So she is not an official downwinder. But that doesn't mean her thyroid cancer wasn't caused by nuclear fallout, says Dickson.

 Now 45 and director of creative services for KUED-TV, Dickson was diagnosed with cancer when she was 29. Thyroid cancer has a excellent cure-rate and Dickson is now healthy. But the experience has left her wary of official rhetoric that downplays the effects and reach of nuclear testing. And her distrust doesn't stop there, she says.

 "Here we come to the other end of the Cold War and people want to store spent nuclear fuel rods (in Utah's western desert). It amazes me that Utahns aren't more outraged."

 Dickson's story highlights the pitfalls and frustrations of trying to track down the cause of any particular cancer. How do you know when to chalk an illness up to bad luck or the environment? How do you separate exposure to fallout from exposure to another carcinogen.

 "There's no way I can prove how I got it," says Dickson about her thyroid cancer. "But there's no way they can prove that's not how I got it either."

 Although her claims would have been dismissed as a leap of logic just a few years ago, a 1997 report released by the National Cancer Institute found that much of the nation was blanketed with fallout from the 141 atmospheric tests performed at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 through 1962. "Downwinders All" is the title of Dickson's essay that appears in "Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader," published this year by the University of Arizona Press. "There wasn't a magic shield in Richfield that kept fallout from going anywhere else," says Dickson. "People need to know that what happens in other people's back yard also happens to them."

 Although some people were exposed to radiation by direct exposure " the atomic dust actually landed on their bodies and wafted through their windows " there was also another, more insidious route: air-to-grass-to-milk. The isotope Iodine-131 (just one of several radionuclides in fallout) lands on grass, is eaten by cows, collects in milk and is deposited in human thyroid glands. Because children have a higher metabolism and generally drink more milk, they are most affected by I-131. Those who drank milk from back-yard cows and back-yard goats in the 1950s, got the highest doses, but commercial milk was also a culprit.

 From her stack of documents and articles " and letters from other people who have cancer " Dickson produces a report called "Exposure of the American People to IODINE-131 from Nevada Nuclear-Bomb Tests." Published in 1999 by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, it notes that data from the 1986 nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl points to a clear link between thyroid cancer and exposure to I-131.

 The accumulated fallout exposure from the Nevada Test Site was three times as much as that from Chernobyl, noted scientist Owen Hoffman in 1998 congressional testimony. Hoffman is former chief scientist for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

 The National Cancer Institute's Web site provides a "dose calculator" for fallout from the Nevada Test Site: rex.nci.nih.gov/INTRFCE_GIFS/radiation_fallout/radiation_131.html
Chose a state and a county and type in a birth date and you'll be given fallout doses for "average diet milk consumption," "high milk consumption" etc. But don't expect to understand the numbers; they're expressed as geometric standard deviation rather than as absolute rads. And the dose range they provide is enormous, because scientists still aren't sure what the exact doses were. In addition, as the NCI notes, "we don't know exactly how much the risk (of thyroid cancer) goes up with each rad of exposure."

 Type in Mary Dickson's birth date and county (and get a scientist to explain what the numbers mean) and you'll discover that above-ground tests plus leaks from underground tests added up to between 3.7 and 39 rads of I-131 for Dickson, who drank a lot of milk as a young child.

 Currently the FDA's protective action guides for radiation exposure is 1.5 rad to 15 rad (the latter is the level at which the government confiscates milk from market before distribution).

 According to Chuck Wiggins, director of the Utah Cancer Registry, rates for thyroid cancer in the United States have increased "consistently" since 1973 (the national registry's first year). There is no way to prove, though, that this increase is a result of nuclear testing.

 Joseph Lyon, a chronic disease epidemiologist at the University of Utah, is waiting for the federal government to free up funding for a thyroid study of 5,000 southern Utahns exposed to fallout in the 1950s. This would be be third part of a longitudinal study, begun in the late 1960s, of adults who were children when exposed.

 "I don't think the federal government wants to know the answer, because guess who the polluter is," says Lyon.

 "It's so frustrating to be the people who are sick and trying to figure anything out," Dickson says. As usual, she says, the burden of proof lies with the victim.

 She spends many of her evenings now attending meetings " Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah " because stopping the storage of spent nuclear rods "is the most important issue we can be fighting now." She expects no compensation as a downwinder, she says. "I just want the government to admit the fallout was more widespread than they've ever admitted."

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com