THE simmering debate over whether servicemen who witnessed nuclear tests in the 1950s are more likely to get cancer is unlikely to be settled by the latest major study.
快猫短视频 has learned that the study, by Britain鈥檚 National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), will conclude that the cancer rate among test veterans is no higher than normal. But even before it has been published, the analysis has been attacked as 鈥渂iased鈥� by the researcher whose investigations prompted it. The number of veterans affected may be small, but at stake is whether the government should give them compensation.
Over 25,000 members of the British armed services watched 46 nuclear tests in Australia and the Pacific between 1952 and 1962, as did many US and Australian servicemen. Some have developed cancer and blame it on the radiation they were exposed to.
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The US government decided to give its veterans the benefit of the doubt and since 1988 has paid compensation to about 500 with cancer, including many who occupied Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The Australian government is reviewing whether its 8000 veterans of British tests should be entitled to compensation. Britain鈥檚 Ministry of Defence, however, has consistently rejected claims by British ex-servicemen, citing two earlier epidemiological studies by the NRPB that found no increase in cancer rates among veterans.
The most recent, in 1993, was challenged in 1998 by Sue Rabbitt Roff of the University of Dundee鈥檚 Centre for Medical Education (快猫短视频, 6 February 1999, p 51). She found more cases of multiple myeloma among veterans, prompting the NRPB to launch a third study.
快猫短视频 hasn鈥檛 seen the study but has been told that it will say that only 35 out of 21,357 test veterans contracted multiple myeloma up to the end of 1998, a rate no higher than that in a control group of men of comparable ages. Roff alleges, however, that the NRPB has ignored a further 19 cases of multiple myeloma for which there is good documentary evidence, including death certificates.
鈥淭hey acknowledge that if more than 15 per cent of the cases of multiple myeloma have been missed, their study is unrepresentative and indeed biased,鈥� she says. 鈥淎fter three years and the expenditure of a huge amount of public funding, that unfortunately is the case.鈥�
But the study is defended by the NRPB鈥檚 head of population exposure, Gerry Kendal. Around 15 per cent of veterans were omitted from the study because inadequate records were kept on them. To include multiple myeloma cases from this group would have skewed the study, Kendal contends. And some of the extra multiple myelomas were also 鈥渙f uncertain reliability鈥�, he adds, because they were not registered by the Office for National Statistics.
Dudley Goodhead, director of the Medical Research Council鈥檚 Radiation and Genome Stability Unit in Harwell, Oxfordshire, says it is essential that the criteria for including cases are precise. 鈥淏ut if it is confirmed that a third of cases are really missing from the study, this must surely put some doubts on the reliability of the conclusions.鈥�