Mr. Jablon. I would just like to comment on some of the remarks that have been made. The largest study that I know of involves essentially an unselected population, the studies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have, of course, paid a great deal of attention to the problem of trying to identify specific effects of rather large doses, not small. There has not been to date, and the studies have now been going for thirty years, any evidence of cardiovascular disease being affected by the acute doses. The chronic effects have largely been in the area of cancer production. Dr. Morgan. Dr. Bertell? Dr. Bertell. I would like to respond to Mr. Jablon on the Hiroshima data. I have looked at that quite carefully. What he said was correct, but this is a sensitive point. He referred to acute doses of radiation, which I believe are at least over 200 rad. I am interested, and I think this conference is interested, in low-level effects; diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease were significant at the lower levels. There is a built-in assumption in the study on the Hiroshima data, anything that shows up at a low level should show up worse at a higher level. I think this is false to the biological picture. You are dealing here, as far as I can see, with an overkill. If the cells are destroyed, they are sloughed off from the body. They do not continue to live within the body and produce misinformation and reproduce themselves within the body. The effects at the low levels are different from the effects at the higher level. We cannot say, because something was not more acute at a high level, therefore it did not occur as a radiation related thing. Mr. Jablon. May I respond to that? Dr. Morgan. Dr. Martell has asked for the floor. Dr. Martell. In the context of the last comment, you might let him go ahead. Mr. Jablon. I would like to respond in two ways. First, I would like to refer back to something Dr. Morgan said in his initial statement. Dr. Morgan stated that the effects of low-level radiation were certain things. I am sure he would agree that this is inferential. Nobody, in fact, has ever demonstrated that cancers do occur at the kind of low levels we are talking about today. effects observed at high levels to what might be found at low levels. I see that Sister Bertell is shaking her head; no doubt she will have something to say about that. In any case, to assume, then, that an effect on the cardiovascular system will occur at low levels of radiation when it is not observed to occur at high levels depends on something other than human data to substantiate it, and we can all have our own opinions about what is at work here. Dr. Morgan. Dr. Bertell? Dr. Bertell. There are three fuzzy ideas that go around about radiation, first that all exposure is harmful, secondly, that genetic damage is observable but it cannot be connected specifically with certain diseases, and thirdly that there is a nonspecific generalized effect similar to aging. This is the kind of vague hypothesis which I tried to address by measuring what I call the aging effect, because I do not know what else to call it, but apparently within the human body we have a biofeedback system or have certain chemicals which enable us to respond to change in our environment. As we grow older, our responses are less perfect, or we are less able to take care of some kinds of homeostatic adjustments. From the measurements which I did in the Tri-state study, you can find a comparable effect from radiation. In other words, I am talking about something that happens to you when you are exposed to radiation and which is comparable to what happens to you when you live over the period of a year exposed to natural background radiation or whatever else you are exposed to. I think what we are dealing with here is not a question of exposing the whole population and noting that a few people get cancer. What we are dealing with is the fact that everybody gets an effect. You have some kind of an insult on the human body that is measurable, and this happens to everybody, all groups. Your risk of cancer, leukemia, of perhaps many other things is increased, and that is where the chance element comes in, but it is a secondary effect. Some of this is clear and can be proven. It indicates a need for further research and research along this line, because if we do not ask the right questions, no matter now long we study and look at the data, we are not going to get the answers out of it. What I am proposing here is not that all of the questions are answered, but that there is a new technology available. It is viable, promising, has already given some results, and needs to be broadened. We need to apply this to the data available. We need to ask better questions. Dr. Sternglass. There is very serious concern that what we have just heard about the possibility of a generalized aging effect that would affect heart disease has in fact happened during the period of nuclear testing. I would like to show that on one slide in just a minute. (See Figure 1.) This is a plot of the disease called arteriosclerotic heart disease, identified by the International Disease Classification Number 420, for the period 1945 to about 1970. It shows the mortality rate per 100,000 for the states of New Mexico, Utah, Georgia, Texas and Illinois. As you can see, also from the data for the U.S. average, there was a very sharp and unexplained rise starting about '48 when this classification of disease was introduced. It sharply rose and peaked just exactly at the time of the end of nuclear testing. You can see from the dots marked U.S. 410-13 that it has come down very rapidly since then. This is now supported by animal studies that show that animals given high doses of radiation and cholesterol together develop a high incidence of arteriosclerotic heart disease. I suggest it is this kind of synergistic effect between radiation and cholesterol that is totally unexpected which is something that we must absolutely look into. The same increase and decline in heart disease we have now seen in Europe and we have in England and Wales, in proportion to the amount of strontium 90 deposited from north to south, just as for New Mexico, Utah, and Georgia where we find there is an increasing amount of rainfall and a proportionate increasing amount of strontium 90 in the milk. Until we have fully resolved this kind of a possibility, that arteriosclerotic heart disease may be produced by a combination of dietary chemicals and radiation, I think to go ahead with the major reliance on nuclear energy with associated emissions of nuclear plants could be a disaster for our nation. Dr. Morgan. Dr. Archer? Dr. Archer. About the figures that Dr. Sternglass was showing us; it occurred to me that this sort of situation can result when the composition of the population is changing. A lower birthrate could well appear on some of the mortality charts. That increases death rate and things. Dr. Sternglass. I will comment on that. We examine this by age group as well. Each age group shows it independently. Furthermore cancer in Japan and heart disease in the U.S. has come down sharply again in recent years, and the same kind of pattern occurred in countries with very different menon, the sudden rise and sudden declines in arteriosclerotic heart disease associated with the onset and decline of nuclear testing. I do not mean by any means to claim that this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what I am saying. We are dealing with unknown amounts of alpha emitters that may be getting into the arteries. We know from animal studies and recent human studies of women who had been exposed to post-operative radiation treatment for breast tumors, that a number have developed arterial complications. This has been published in Radiology (Consequences to Radiologists and Medical Specialists), recently. We know that radiation is indeed able to induce arteriosclerotic heart disease in man. Dr. Morgan. Dr. Bertell? Dr. Bertell. Many of the already published radiation articles also include cerebrovascular disease. For example, in the ankylosing spondylitis study, class D, which was not supposed to be in any way associated with the disease itself, had a significantly high rate of occurrence among the people. This disease class D included the cerebrovascular and other circulatory dis eases. The article to which I think Dr. Sternglass just referred showed consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation for medical specialists and radiologists. Mortality from cancer, cardiovascular-renal disease, and all other causes combined were increased in societies with high exposure to radiation. This is across the board. It also occurs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki data but primarily at the low and moderate exposure levels, not at the high exposure levels. Dr. Morgan. Mr. Jablon? Mr. Jablon. For deaths from vascular lesions of the central nervous system -- strokes, that is to say -- I do not know just what was meant by low dose, but at the lowest range we have, which is zero to nine rads, the mortality in Hiroshima was 74 percent of the Japanese standard and in Nagasaki 95 percent. So in both cases, it was lower than the Japanese national rates. In neither city, is there any radiation group that significantly differed from any other group in terms of mortality from that cause. For diseases of the circulatory system in Nagasaki, there are no significant differences. In the zero to nine rads group the mortality ratio was 93 percent of the Japanese standard; ten to forty-nine rads, 113 percent. This is up a little bit, but the differences were not statistically significant. In Hiroshima |