US underestimated vets' radiation doses - study
Date: 12-May-03
Country: USA
Some of the highest doses were probably underestimated by as much as two or three times, the report from the National Research Council, one of the National Academies of Science, said.
But that does not mean the exposures caused cancer in the veterans, it said.
"The committee hopes that veterans will understand that their radiation exposure probably did not cause their cancer in most cases," the report reads.
Nonetheless, it recommended that the Department of Defense revise its reconstructions of the doses that certain groups were exposed to.
"The veterans have legitimate complaints about their radiation dose reconstructions," said John Till, president of Risk Assessment Corporation of Neeses, South Carolina, who chaired the committee.
The United States conducted about 200 above-ground nuclear-weapons tests between 1945 and 1962. Many times troops were part of the experiments or nearby.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency later worried about the health of these men and women and started a review. But records were not always carefully kept and many participants did not wear radiation detectors, or the badges were lost.
So the agency had to reconstruct and estimate how much radiation they were exposed to for use in evaluating claims by the veterans as they have aged and developed health problems.
Congress asked a committee of experts, including cancer researchers and radiation specialists, to review 99 individual dose reconstructions for military personnel.
The veterans were either involved in nuclear weapons tests, prisoners of war in Japan when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed or stationed in Japan after World War II.
The committee found that while the methods used to estimate average doses are generally valid, upper-bound doses are often underestimated.
However, except for exposure to beta radiation, which may cause skin cancer, the committee did not find that very many more veterans would be able to successfully claim compensation.
