Pattern of willful ignorance?

Deseret Morning News editorial
Published: Wednesday, April 6, 2005 10:16 a.m. MDT
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Are the people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention interested in science? Or are they more interested in politics or in protecting the government's reputation?

Utahns can be forgiven for a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to matters such as the long-term effects of above-ground nuclear tests that took place in Nevada in the 1950s and '60s. Government officials lied to folks here back then about the dangers of what they were doing. Evidence exists to show they knew about the possible harm that fallout could produce. And today, more than 40 years later, the CDC has pulled the plug on research that could have, once and for all, provided answers about the connection between the tests and thyroid diseases that later developed among people here.

We have been especially troubled by former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt's silent complicity in ending the study. He now is secretary of health and human services, which administers the CDC, and he appears to have backed away from his earlier concerns, as governor, about the "epidemic of cancer and other radiation-related illnesses" that Utahns experienced as a result of the tests.

But now comes evidence that the CDC may be following a pattern of willful ignorance on the subject that stretches back more than a decade. A story published Tuesday in this newspaper quotes Dr. Peter Rickards, a member of a citizens advisory committee that a decade ago helped the CDC study how people in Idaho were affected by tests at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. When the committee began drawing links that went beyond the laboratory and pointed toward the Nevada Test Site, the CDC seemed to lose interest. Funding for that study was pulled, also.

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Rickards said CDC researchers ignored evidence of health problems related to contaminated milk, which would likely have been a result of fallout from Nevada, and instead relied on "fuzzy estimates." The advisory panel on which he sat recommended adding data from the National Cancer Institute showing that Idaho and Montana were hit harder by Nevada test-site fallout than was Utah. Yet the CDC wasn't interested.

"It basically took two years . . . before I could see they actually had no intention of reviewing real doses," Rickards told the Deseret Morning News.

Why? What possible reason could the CDC have for shying away from a full and complete study of how fallout from government-sponsored tests affected the thyroid glands of people downwind, no matter how far away? Are officials there worried the government may have to pay benefits to relatives of the people affected?

Perhaps folks here seem a little obsessed with this issue. You get that way when relatives and other loved ones seem to suffer from cancer at inordinate rates. Perhaps, too, the fallout didn't really produce the health effects that the evidence seems to suggest.

But without a comprehensive study, no one will ever know for sure.

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