Doctor says CDC ignored effects of fallout in Idaho

It's no surprise to Dr. Peter Rickards that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is refusing to continue paying for a study of fallout health effects on Utahns who lived near the Nevada Test Site.

Earlier studies showed thyroid abnormalities among the Utahns, and scientists from the University of Utah have been doing follow-up examinations. But citing the $8 million already spent and two extensions of deadlines, the CDC says it will end funding on Aug. 31. Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, who heads the U.'s study, says the project was slowed by CDC bureaucracy and cost more because of overhead.

The CDC's apparent failure to dig hard for fallout facts sounds like old news to Rickards, an Idaho Falls podiatrist.

In the 1990s and earlier this decade, he was part of a citizens advisory committee for a CDC-funded study — the INEEL Dose Reconstruction Project. The study was supposed to compute radiation doses to residents living near the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, now known as the INL or the Idaho National Laboratory, in southeastern Idaho.

The lab has experimented with nuclear material for decades and, according to the CDC, it is known to have released radiation.

After seven years of involvement with the project, Rickards said, he has come to believe the CDC wants to "downplay the overwhelming impact of the Nevada Test Site on Idaho and the rest of the country."

Telephone messages left Monday with the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes CDC, and with authors of a radiation study at the Idaho laboratory were not immediately returned.

When the CDC agreed to sponsor a dose reconstruction effort to determine radiation doses to Idahoans, Rickards was delighted.

The study began in 1992. He helped advise the study starting in 1993 and was officially made a member of the panel in 1995.

"I was removed from the panel in 2002, so I officially served seven years, but actually served and worked with CDC for nine years," he noted.

Now, Rickards said bitterly, he thinks the panel was established "to provide the illusion of openness and honesty."

"It basically took two years . . . before I could see they actually had no intention of reviewing real doses," he said.

One issue that concerned him involved how much radiation area residents received from fallout drifting into Idaho after open-air atomic bomb blasts at the Nevada Test Site, in addition to the lab's releases.

"I had been told that the alarms used to go off frequently" in the lab. "They would check the equipment and nothing had melted down or anything at that moment." The cause was fallout.

Other fallout data were gathered in the period, he said. Weekly samples of Iodine-131 were taken from dairies around the lab from 1957 onward. "They have spikes in that data from Nevada Test Site," he said.

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