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Cold War fallout for Brookhaven National Lab

Conard

On Bikini Atoll, Dr. Robert Conard strolled along an empty beach, a cameraman shooting an industrial film following his every move. On that day, nearly 20 years after the 1954 "Bravo" blast was detonated on Bikini, Conard wanted the world to know it was OK for the atoll's nuclear exiles to return. 
Bikini's residents had been evacuated since 1946, when the first of 23 U.S. nuclear-bomb tests on the atoll began. The biggest of all - the Bravo hydrogen bomb explosion - spread a cloud of radioactive debris into the air that covered the islands of Rongelap and Utirik more than 100 miles away. 
By the early 1970s Conard, then head of Brookhaven National Laboratory's medical team in the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a>, stated firmly that no similar health problems would happen at Bikini when its people returned. 
"They should have a very fine village and a good life on the island when they return," Conard said in the film about Bikini's 540 exiled residents. "I hope they will be happy when they come back. The radiation levels on Bikini are so very slight - and so many precautions have been taken to reduce the levels to extremely low amounts - that there should not be any real hazards for these people when they return." 
In 1968, U.S. President <a href="/topics/Lyndon_B._Johnson">Lyndon B. Johnson</a> relied on the advice of government consultants, including Conard, to promise Bikinians they could go home without any danger. "We frankly do not expect any significant level of internal radiation to accumulate in these people," Conard wrote to U.S. officials shortly after the president's go-ahead. "Bikini is entirely safe for their return." 
But Conard's assurances of safety soon proved flawed. Just as the Rongelap residents had been returned to their atoll in 1957 after a three-year absence, the Bikini people began to return in the early 1970s. But their stay did not last long. Less than seven years after their return, Conard's Brookhaven team, working under contract to what is now the Department of Energy, reversed itself, rescinding its earlier promises that Bikini was safe to inhabit. By 1978, Bikini Atoll was empty again. 
Newsday's review of once-secret Cold War records filed with the U.S. Nuclear Claims Tribunal shows the Brookhaven team minimized the potential dangers in this return to Bikini just as they had done with Rongelap. They also delayed alerting their patients about the evidence of serious contaminants found in their bodies, the records show. The cancer death of an 11-year-old boy, born on Bikini in 1971, was later linked to radiation exposure he received while living there with the people who came back to their contaminated homeland, according to tribunal records. 
"A serious error and miscalculation" had been made by the U.S.-sponsored program that resulted in "endangering the health and welfare of the Bikinians who returned to Bikini," the tribunal said in a March 2001 ruling awarding $563 million in compensation to the island's former residents. The Bikinians later went to a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., to try to collect that money, but so far have been unsuccessful. 
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Today, <a href="/topics/U.S._Energy_Corp.">U.S. Energy</a> Department officials say they and Brookhaven officials responded properly as more information was learned about radiation on Bikini. In April 1978 the Brookhaven team found that radiation levels in those who returned to Bikini were well above U.S. maximum permissible levels. During that time, tests pointed to the dangers of staying on Bikini, including unsafe levels of the radioactive element strontium-90 in the well water and an 11-fold increase of cesium-137, also radioactive, in the bodies of more than 100 people tested. By that September, Brookhaven and U.S. officials decided they must evacuate everyone from Bikini again. 
In reversing his stance about Bikini, Conard suggested Brookhaven expand its monitoring program. "What about the need for future medical examinations in the Bikini people now that they have been removed to non-contaminated islands?" Conard asked in a memo to U.S. officials. "From our experience with the Rongelap, Utirik and Bikini people, it is clear that the psychological effects of living on contaminated islands (fear of development of radiation effects; association of nearly all ailments with the radiation exposure) indicate that regular medical checkups on both Bikini and Enewetak people who have lived or are living on contaminated islands are most desirable." Both Bikini and Enewetak were sites for bomb tests. 
Still, Conard had predicted the long-term cancer threat among the 143 people living on Bikini in 1978 would be relatively minimal. "One could only expect about 0.005 total cases of leukemia to develop in that population as a result of their radiation exposure," Conard advised. 
In that same memo, Conard indicated he would be willing to help provide information about their cancer should they decide to sue the United States for damages. "When cancer develops in these people, which will occur as in any population, U.S. agencies may have to face court claims, and the dilemma of disproving a correlation of such diseases with low-dose radiation exposure will be a discouraging one," Conard predicted. 
After the Bikinians were returned to their atoll, one of those who raised serious questions about it was a BNL doctor. "Their blood is taken, they are measured and, at times, subjected to body scans," Dr. Konrad Kotrady wrote in a 1977, 14-page report to BNL. He was a physician sent by BNL to live in the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a> and deal with the health needs of people from Bikini, Rongelap and Utirik. Kotrady's contract with BNL was later not renewed. "People indicated that they have complained of certain problems for years and the doctors always do nothing or tell them nothing. Now if an American was to go through this process each year for 20 years, would he also not consider himself a research subject - a type of guinea pig, if you will?" 
Kotrady's report went on to question the scientific accuracy of Brookhaven's work in dealing with all <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a> inhabitants. He said in the report that the festering distrust of BNL at Rongelap had spread to Utirik, where a thyroid problem emerged despite Conard's earlier assurances - according to Kotrady - that radiation there "was too low to cause any harmful effects." 
Kotrady pointed out in the report that Utirik's residents exposed to the Bravo blast later developed a higher ratio of thyroid cancer than those from Rongelap. 
"The distrust the people have for Dr. Conard developed because of the inconsistency when he stresses no problem exists and then, at a later time, an actual health problem arises," Kotrady explained in his report. "The people ask if this thyroid problem has suddenly occurred, is it not possible that the experts have been wrong for so many years and that more problems will occur in the future?" 
On Bikini, Kotrady said in the report, the 100 people who returned among the exiled 541 "fear the 'poison' (radiation) that might be lingering on the island." He said Brookhaven's "official policy" claimed the Bikinians received no further radiation because of the earlier cleanup, even though the government's own environmental studies "still show areas of radiation concentration" leading to new warnings about eating local foods. 
"Recently, plutonium was discovered for the first time in significant levels in the urine of residents of Bikini indicating the people are absorbing some radiation," Kotrady wrote. "The people fail to understand how scientists can say they do not know all the possible late effects the radiation can cause, that indeed plutonium and other lingering radiation exists on the island such that some foods cannot be eaten, and then tell the people there is no danger and a medical program is unnecessary." 
When the physician's report landed on Long Island, Conard summoned him for a meeting at Brookhaven National Lab. In a conference room with about a dozen Brookhaven officials, including Conard's boss, Dr. Eugene Cronkite, Kotrady said he defended his report. 
Conard "was very defensive about it, and he took it like the other researchers did - that we're doing these people a favor by being out there," recalled Kotrady. "At the time, they were very adamant that they had done everything right." 
Brookhaven's actions at Bikini would further undermine its relationship with all of the Marshall Islanders. 
"Here are these islanders, very uneducated, without having any information available to them, intuitively knowing that the place, Bikini, cannot be safe after 23 nuclear weapons explosions, [and] the biggest hydrogen bomb that the United States had ever detonated in their history," said Jack Niedenthal, Bikini's main administrator, whose wife's family lived on contaminated Bikini during the 1970s. "It was their moral obligation to explain this to people. It's very sad that this wasn't being done." 
A few months after the second Bikini evacuation, Conard retired from Brookhaven Lab. After nearly a quarter century of overseeing the health impact from nuclear fallout on the Marshallese, Conard left in December 1978, saying much of his work had been accomplished. 
That same year, Jendrik Leviticus and his family were living on Bikini when he traveled in June 1978 with some Bikini leaders to testify before a congressional subcommittee in Washington. With Leviticus beside him, a Bikini leader, Tomaki Juda, told the panel, "We simply want and need your help to resettle our community and to let us try to become once again the people we were before the arrival of the atom and hydrogen bombs." 
It was the 1982 cancer death of Leviticus' 11-year-old son, Dial, that the Nuclear Claims Tribunal ruled in 2001 was linked to living on contaminated Bikini. The tribunal determined he was exposed to at least 1600 millirems of radiation above background levels during a more than two-year period, which "more likely than not" caused his cancer. Dial developed a very aggressive form of lymphoma. The acceptable level for background exposure at that time was 140 millirems per year. 
Today, some 3,700 villagers from Bikini are nuclear nomads, just like those from Rongelap. Niedenthal, the administrator for Bikini's government in exile, said many live throughout the Marshall Islands. Both village halls in exile are next to each other in Majuro, the nation's capital, 400 miles from their homelands. 
Unlike those from Rongelap who dream of going back, Niedenthal said the majority from Bikini are reluctant to return despite a U.S.-funded cleanup. They are worried about radiation lingering at this "ground zero" site. "How could it be safe?" he asked.

Nassau

LFBIKINI23

Brookhaven team minimized risks in return to Bikini

Bravo test on Bikini Atoll in 1954

What was Brookhaven National Laboratory's involvement in the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a>? 
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From 1954 through 1998, medical doctors from BNL were in charge of the care of hundreds of residents of the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a> in the South Pacific. Within this group were more than 200 residents of the island of Rongelap and other atolls who had been exposed to the radioactive fallout from the largest nuclear test explosion in U.S. history, the 1954 hydrogen bomb blast called "Bravo," which spread a cloud of radioactive ash across a wide expanse of ocean. Bravo was the biggest of 67 nuclear bombs tested in the Marshall Islands by the <a href="/topics/United_States">United States</a> from 1946 to 1958 at the height of the Cold War. 
Three U.S. military physicians who initially oversaw this medical program, Robert Conard, Eugene Cronkite and Victor Bond, brought it with them when they left the military and joined BNL in 1955. BNL's medical work in the Marshall Islands was sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and later the <a href="/topics/U.S._Energy_Corp.">U.S. Energy</a> Department, which owns and operates the lab. After years of complaints by the Marshallese about their medical care by the BNL doctors, the Energy Department replaced them in 1998 with another U.S.-funded team. 
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What was the BNL medical team's role? 
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Records show that while providing medical care, BNL doctors also focused on nuclear radiation's impact on the human body. The three doctors were part of a government program called "Project 4.1," whose purpose was to study the human effects from radioactive fallout caused by the Bravo bomb. Funded by the U.S. government, the Brookhaven project - officially called "Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma radiation due to Fall-Out from High Yield Weapons" - was designed to do two things at once, documents show: provide quality medical care to the Marshallese exposed to radiation, and conduct a scientific study of the severity and health consequences of such contamination. 
BNL's dual mission was made clear in a July 1956 report, authored by Cronkite, Bond and an AEC official, that stated that the federal government expected the Brookhaven team "to provide the best possible care of the exposed persons and to make a medical study of the exposed." This meant Brookhaven's team would mix twin duties for the next four decades - as scientists studying the effects of nuclear fallout on a human population, and medical doctors treating the sick. 
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Today how do the Marshall Islanders view the work of the BNL doctors? 
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In short: very critically. Many Marshallese see themselves as having been "guinea pigs" and "unwitting subjects" in a long-running research effort they believe was designed to study the impact of radiation on a human population at the expense of their health. Their bitterness toward the lab is reflected in hundreds of pages of official documents assembled by a little-known group called the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, whose documents are available to be read online at nuclearclaimstribunal.com. 
The islanders say in these documents that the doctors failed to disclose to them that their homeland was contaminated, along with their food and water. Among a list of grievances, the islanders also said that the doctors found levels of plutonium in some patients' urine samples but never told the patients of that discovery. They say that medical procedures, such as the removal of thyroid glands, were done without their informed consent and that the doctors were far more interested in studying them rather than addressing their medical concerns. Many islanders told the tribunal that they felt humiliated and "dehumanized" by their treatment - such as being told to strip in front of others so they could be hosed down - and, moreover, that they were often not told why they were being sent to the <a href="/topics/United_States">United States</a> for "unexplained" medical procedures. 
Distrustful of the BNL doctors' work, the residents of Rongelap secretly fled their island in 1985 on a ship owned by Greenpeace, an international environmental organization - a move the BNL doctors later criticized as unnecessary. To date, they have not returned to their homeland, which today is empty of people except for crews working on U.S.-funded rehabilitation projects. 
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What do BNL and the Department of Energy say about the lab's role in the Marshall Islands? 
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BNL's doctors, who worked for 43 years with the Marshallese, have said in various forums that their treatment was appropriate as they responded to the unknowns of radioactive fallout during the years when Cold War tensions and fears were at their height. All three of the principle doctors are now dead, and the current managers of the lab say they will not discuss the lab's long history in the Marshall Islands. They say records of that work no longer exist, and thyroids removed from a number of islanders, once stored at the lab, cannot be found. 
Conard, who retired from BNL in 1979 and died in 2001, wrote a 64-page report about the team's experiences called "Fallout," published in 1992 by the lab. He says contamination fears were exaggerated and the affected islanders overreacted. 
"In carrying out these examinations, the medical teams were faced with many problems and dilemmas, some of which were unforeseen and unique to a medical group," Conard wrote. "Some of the problems were related to cultural differences, and to the lack of understanding by the Marshallese of radiation and its effects, resulting in unfounded fears and psychological effects." 
Today, Energy Department officials say BNL's doctors performed admirably. "At the time Brookhaven delivered the services for us, they were world-class," said Patricia Worthington, the department's director of health and safety. "They were recognized for their expertise in understanding the health effects from radiation. They were liked by the Marshallese, and they were well-respected at that time." 
Beyond the department, a U.S. presidential advisory panel ruled in 1995 that BNL's work in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War did not amount to human experimentation. However, the panel did say that BNL doctors injected radioactive substances into the bodies of some Marshall Islands residents for no legitimate medical purpose and also that the doctors' actions were taken without the consent of their patients. 
"Because there was virtually no therapeutic benefit envisioned, it appears the primary goal of the study was to measure radiation exposures for research purposes, although the knowledge may have been helpful in the clinical care of the patient," the panel wrote. 
In a Newsday interview in January 2007, a few months before he died, Bond said research on the Marshallese was justified because they had already been exposed to radiation from the Bravo blast and anything scientists might find would help save American lives in the event of a future nuclear war. 
"Nobody - including myself, Cronkite, anybody concerned with it - did not regard this as, did not design, an experiment," Bond said. "The situation was produced by means other than our desire to do research. So no one had it in mind that they were dealing with this as a guinea pig situation." 
One Brookhaven doctor who had a different view of the team's treatment of the Marshallese was Dr. Konrad Kotrady, who spent a year in the mid-1970s as the lab's representative in the islands. He told BNL officials that many islanders distrusted the lab and, in particular, that they objected to the doctors' decision not to tell patients about plutonium found in their urine samples. 
"People indicated that they have complained of certain problems for years and the doctors always do nothing or tell them nothing," he wrote in a 1977 report to BNL. "Now if an American was to go through this process each year for 20 years, would he also not consider himself a research subject - a type of guinea pig, if you will?" 
&nbsp; 
What is the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, and what did it say about nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands? 
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The Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal, set up in 1988 by the U.S. and Marshall Islands governments, spent more than a decade investigating radiation contamination in the islands and then setting damages. Starting in 2000, the panel approved $341 million for damages and cleanup at the Enewetak atoll and a $560-million damages claim by Bikini, both "ground zero" sites where U.S. nuclear bombs were exploded. 
In December 2006, the tribunal awarded $300 million in damages to Utirik, another contaminated island whose residents, like those on Rongelap, had been under BNL's care. In April 2007 the tribunal awarded the biggest amount - $1 billion - to Rongelap and its surrounding islands. Residents were initially evacuated after the 1954 Bravo blast but then, three years later, were allowed to return to their homes even though BNL and others knew the island was contaminated. 
Of that $1 billion, $780 million was pegged to "past and future loss" of properties on Rongelap and the islands. This loss covered land but also lagoons, reefs, clam beds, turtle and bird nesting grounds as well as loss of use of personal sites such as family cemeteries. The tribunal awarded another $212 million for "remediation and restoration," which covered removal of contaminated soil. 
Finally, the tribunal awarded $34 million to the Rongelap people for "consequential damages." Specifically, the tribunal cited the decision - approved by the BNL doctors - to allow the island's residents to move back to the island in 1957 even though the doctors had said such a move should never happen because of high levels of contamination. "Although the people were assured that it was safe to return to Rongelap in 1957, it was evident that the U.S. knew Rongelap was still contaminated at that time," the tribunal wrote. 
Beyond this, the tribunal determined BNL and other U.S. officials knew of the threat of contaminated food consumed by the Rongelapese and did not immediately warn them so they could trace the flow of contamination through their bodies. Warnings against eating this food were "not implemented until several years after the people returned, and the resulting exposure allowed scientists to measure the amount of radionuclides present in human beings," the tribunal wrote. 
One section of the tribunal's report included an exhibit that states that the residents of Rongelap and two other atolls "served as unwitting subjects in a series of experiments designed to take advantage of the research opportunities accompanying exposure of a distinct human population to radiation. . . . Initial findings from this and other biological research projects helped shape the goals and approach to an integrated long-term study on the human and environmental effects of nuclear weapons fallout that began in 1954 and was continued by Brookhaven National Laboratory until 1998." 
The Bush administration opposed these damage awards, saying more than $530 million already had been spent over the years on various rehab projects and health compensation throughout the Marshall Islands. Attempts by the Marshallese to collect the tribunal awards in federal court actions have to date failed. What the Obama administration will do about these awards, if anything, is unclear, and they had no further word this past week. 
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What did the tribunal say about BNL's actions in the Marshall Islands? 
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In its Bikini decision, the tribunal cited the return of Bikinians in the early 1970s to their contaminated atoll as a reason for the award. The tribunal said U.S. doctors assured the residents that Bikini was safe when they knew otherwise. A film made at the time shows a confident Conard on Bikini promising residents they would be safe. On the video, he says that the people on Rongelap were also safe, even though BNL's own documents show health problems on the island were escalating at that time. 
"We know from our experiences on Rongelap that the low levels of radiation there that persisted in the soil after the fallout were insufficient to cause any hazards to the Rongelap people," Conard said in the early 1970s film. "So I wouldn't expect there should be any hazard here." 
In 1978, all the residents of Bikini were removed when radiation levels in their bodies rose sharply. In its March 2001 ruling, the tribunal said "a serious error and miscalculation had been made by the United States Government at the time endangering the health and welfare of the Bikinians who returned to Bikini." The tribunal linked the lymphoma death of an 11-year-old boy to radiation exposure from that return. 
In the 2006 Utirik decision, the tribunal specifically cited testimony that BNL doctors ignored patients health complaints and that a "lack of trust stems from the doctors telling the people that 'everything is all right now' in juxtaposition with an increased number of radiation-related diseases in recent years." 
BNL is also cited in the tribunal's Rongelap decision. Specifically, the tribunal, in questioning the 1957 decision to return 250 people to a still-contaminated island, said, in effect, that the goal of studying the human impact of radiation trumped medicine. In the tribunal's words, "the people came to feel like guinea pigs, used for experimentation by the U.S." 
The tribunal also made it clear that "the long-term monitoring of the Rongelapese was given to a U.S. government facility, Brookhaven National Laboratory . . . " 
The tribunal also wrote, "Ample evidence was presented as to the people's belief that their health was affected as a result of living in a contaminated environment." The tribunal went one step further and wrote that the Rongelap people living in such an environment "supported scientific research and military defense concerns" during the Cold War.

LFQNA23

Questions and answers about the island and the lab

On their trips to America, Marshallese patients suffering from radiation-related nodules on their thyroids were treated at times to sightseeing boat rides around <a href="/topics/Manhattan">Manhattan</a>. Others were invited to swim at the East Setauket home of Dr. Robert Conard, the head of Brookhaven National Laboratory's medical team in the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a>. 
Many of these patients were then sent on to <a href="/topics/Cleveland">Cleveland</a>, to be further evaluated by Dr. Brown Dobyns, a thyroid expert at Case Western University's medical school. 
During his career, Dobyns joined the Brookhaven team on 13 trips to Rongelap and other islands and performed about 80 thyroid surgeries on the Marshallese. To the Marshallese who experienced these surgeries, BNL's thyroid surgery program was motivated more by research needs than by concern for patients' well-being. 
In a 2006 interview, Dobyns, who is now retired, said his aggressive surgical approach was justified to avoid possible cancer of the thyroid. "I had to go through a great deal of abuse from some others because I was doing it more thoroughly," he said. 
The thyroid, which plays a role in regulating the body's metabolism, is particularly susceptible to radiation damage. 
Newsday's review of records pertaining to BNL's long history in the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a> shows that the lab oversaw payments of nearly $3 million for thyroid surgeries performed on as many as 117 Marshallese during a three-decade period. At first, in the late 1960s, the surgical patients came from Rongelap, but soon the patient pool extended to surrounding islands like Utirik, where Brookhaven doctors once believed many people had been not exposed to the radioactive fallout from U.S. atomic testing in the 1950s. Documents show about 25 percent of the thyroid surgeries were performed on those once classified as "unexposed." 
Congressional legislation in 1977 provided the money, which was funded through the U.S. Department of Interior, records show, and overseen by BNL. In interviews with Newsday, Dobyns and former Brookhaven officials said the payments were necessary. 
"There was an incentive to them because these people had essentially no money and no medical care," Dobyns said. "You'd arrive in an atoll and they'd come running and throw their arms around you. But they were anxious because they knew they'd get $25,000 if we operated on them." 
While BNL contended surgery actually reduced the number of eventual thyroid cancers, the physician later hired by the <a href="/topics/United_States">United States</a> to oversee the Marshallese medical care questioned whether the operations should have been done in the first place. 
"A total thyroidectomy was definitely overly aggressive - nobody would do that today with what is known," said Dr. Neal Palafox, who headed the U.S.-funded program from 1998 until last December. "Even in those days it should have been done in a more conservative way. In effect, by taking out their thyroid, you're subjecting them to being hypothyroid all their lives and having to be on medication their whole lives." 
Brookhaven scientists attributed any cancer risk to the initial exposure to the Bravo blast of 1954 and pointed out that most radioactive iodine - the element most likely to collect in human thyroids - had a half-life of only a few days. But others suggested the overall risk for cancer was aggravated by Brookhaven's decision, in 1957, to return hundreds of people to Rongelap, where, records show, they lived in contaminated conditions for nearly 30 years. Palafox said many surgeries on young patients were done without proper "informed consent." 
In 2007, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal awarded Rongelap $1 billion in damages, including millions for being put to live in a contaminated environment. Tribunal records cite one physician who found 63.6 percent of male adults and 76.8 percent of females who were resettled in Rongelap suffered medical problems attributable to exposure to contamination. 
Current Marshallese officials say the thyroid removals with cash payments exploited the radiation victims' vulnerability. "I think it's unethical, I think its racism, and taking advantage of poor people who were uneducated at the time," said James Matayoshi, Rongelap's current mayor. 
Conard - who died in 2001 - and other BNL doctors later said the cancer threat came as a surprise. In its annual medical survey of the Marshallese in 1957, BNL's team found little reason for concern about the islanders' future health. Young children received "moderate doses" of radiation to their thyroids, said Brookhaven researchers, who predicted that "the probabilities are good" that no cancer problems would result from their exposure. 
But a decade later, with many experiencing thyroid problems on Rongelap and surrounding atolls, BNL's view began to fall apart. Records show Conard questioned how radioactive contamination could seep into so many foods eaten by the Marshallese. So he decided to bring native food items such as pandanus fruit and coconut meat back to Brookhaven and eat them himself. 
"I think there was something that struck him as not the way it should have been," recalled Chris Conard, his son. "And he probably felt the only way for him to come up with a proper set of data would have been to create a control situation, in which he put himself in line with the other people that had been exposed in this way. And to treat himself in that way and then study his own body." 
Tests of Conard's urine and excrement over a 180-day period showed that the presence of strontium-90 in his body shot up to 20 times higher than normal, and cesium-137 was "60 times higher than normal," Conard later wrote in a memo. According to interviews with Marshallese and a review of records, Conard apparently never shared this information with the people who had been returned to Rongelap. 
A 1973 report by the governments of Rongelap and nearby Utirik faulted Brookhaven for ignoring medical evidence that children exposed to radioactive particles were more likely to absorb this contamination in their thyroid glands than adults. The report states that BNL "never accounted for this factor until it was blatantly apparent" with the emergence of thyroid tumors. 
"Consistently their reports have tended to minimize effects, or other aspects of the exposure; i.e., dosages seen as 'too small' to have any effect, the size of the group is 'too small' for statistical significance, effects are expected to be 'minimal' over a long period of time, and exposures are referred to as 'sub-lethal' rather than 'near-lethal,' " the report concluded. 
Years later, Conard would write that those who received surgery were fully aware of what was going on. "We explained the need for this treatment and requested their consent," he said in a 1992 report. 
A 1995 U.S. Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments came to a different conclusion about BNL's treatment. "This inherent tension, coupled with the additional strains of language and cultural differences between the Marshall Islanders and the physicians, appears to have compromised the process of informing the subjects of the purpose of the tests and of obtaining their consent, which has doubtless contributed to their sense of being treated as guinea pigs," the committee wrote. 
Dr. Robert McConnell, a thyroid expert at New York Presbyterian Hospital in <a href="/topics/Manhattan">Manhattan</a>, said it is difficult today to second-guess the care given to the Marshall Islanders because medicine's understanding of radiation's effects was still developing. But he said the large number of thyroid cases that emerged should have been a warning of greater radiation danger than originally believed. 
Most troublesome, McConnell said, was Brookhaven's decision to allow patients to return to Rongelap and other contaminated islands after the surgeries. 
"Let's put it this way - if one of those Islanders were my patient, I would have counseled them that it was not prudent to move back after having their thyroids taken out for thyroid cancer," McConnell said. "They had already been exposed to excessive amounts of radiation." 
A 1995 report by the Brookhaven team found that the "epidemic" of thyroid problems was "virtually over" and suggested that the numbers would soon be going down. Those assurances were contradicted by a 2004 National Cancer Institute report which projected that 40 percent of all radiation-related thyroid disease among nearly 14,000 Marshall Islanders exposed to radioactivity during the Cold War had yet to develop. Of the estimated 530 excess cancers caused by radiation exposure throughout this tiny nation, the NCI projected, an estimated 262 would be thyroid cancers. 
Both McConnell and George Annas, chairman of the health law and bioethics department at Boston University's School of Public Health, said they've never heard of such a large sum of money being offered to patients considering surgery in a government-funded research program. 
"The worry here is the exploitation factor - agreeing to something they wouldn't ordinarily agree to, and whether the only reasons why they did this was for the money," Annas said.

LFTHYR23

Removing the thyroids

Thyroid exam

Former <a href="/topics/Stony_Brook_University">Stony Brook University</a> President Shirley Strum Kenny says she was unaware of a $1-billion damage award made by the U.S. Nuclear Claims Tribunal in 2007 to <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a> residents exposed to U.S. nuclear testing during the Cold War. 
A Newsday story published Aug. 23 showed that the residents were returned to their contaminated islands in the late 1950s by medical personnel from Brookhaven National Laboratory and by U.S. officials so that the impact of radiation on their bodies could be studied. 
Although Stony Brook has served as an overseer of the <a href="/topics/Nobel_Prize">Nobel Prize</a>-winning lab since 1997, Kenny said she had never before heard the criticisms of Brookhaven's 43-year medical program in the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a>. Those criticisms were outlined in documents filed by the tribunal in Washington, D.C. 
"Of course I would have wanted to know - these people were shockingly wronged," said Kenny, who retired in June after 15 years on the job, but remains affiliated with the university while on administrative leave. 
BNL spokeswoman Mona Rowe said last week there was no reason to inform Kenny about the tribunal's decision because the lab's involvement in the islands ended in 1998. 
The tribunal's $1-billion award in March 2007 included $34 million in compensatory damages for "emotional distress" involving BNL's treatment of about 250 people who were allowed to live on contaminated islands from 1957 until 1985. Newsday's story also showed that more than 100 Marshallese were persuaded by BNL's team to have questionable thyroid surgery by paying them $25,000 for their cooperation, without their fully informed medical consent. 
"It shocks us as human beings," Kenny said last week. 
BNL's program ended in 1998 when the U.S. Department of Energy replaced the medical team. Since 1997, BNL operation has been overseen by Stony Brook and <a href="/topics/Battelle_Memorial_Institute">Battelle Memorial Institute</a>, an <a href="/topics/Ohio">Ohio</a>-based not-for-profit.

Suffolk

LIBNL30

Ex-Stony Brook chief unaware of $1B nuclear award

Shirley Strum Kenny

A Newsday reporter and photographer have won a first place award for environmental reporting in the National Headliner Awards. 
Thomas Maier and John Paraskevas won the award in the print category of the annual contest for "Fallout: The Legacy of <a href="/topics/Brookhaven%2C_NY">Brookhaven</a> Lab in the Pacific." 
In addition to the stories in the newspaper, a 30- minute, nine-part Internet documentary ran on its Web site in August. 
The multimedia package was about the role of <a href="/topics/Brookhaven%2C_NY">Brookhaven</a> National Laboratory in treating and studying the effects of radiation on the residents of the <a href="/topics/Marshall_Islands">Marshall Islands</a>. The residents were exposed to radiation when the United States dropped Bravo, its largest-ever hydrogen bomb, on the territory in 1954. 
The journalists traveled to the islands, halfway between <a href="/topics/Hawaii">Hawaii</a> and Australia, in the summer of 2007. 
The annual contest is sponsored by the Press Club of <a href="/topics/Atlantic_City">Atlantic City</a>. It recognizes excellence in newspapers, radio, television, photography, magazines and online in areas including beat reporting, series, education, sports and editorial writing.

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Newsday reporter, photographer win 1st place for BNL series

Marshall Islands

Special: Cold War fallout for Brookhaven National Lab

Newsday

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