Pawtucket, RI -

A "human radiation experiment" involving 582 Baltimore third graders carried out by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine using Nasal Radium Irradiation (NRI) to shrink adenoids in an experiment funded by the federal government conducted from 1948 to 1954 has been ignored in recent actions by the Clinton Administration [see US Government, 1997] said a public health scientist with the Radium Experiment Assessment Project today.

said Stewart Farber, M.S. Public Health, Director of the Radium Experiment Assessment Project.

said Farber.

A comprehensive and complete epidemiological study and outreach program is needed immediately to determine what are the real health impacts of NRI procedure on health and to ensure that experimental NRI treated subjects get proper medical notice, follow-up, and treatment where necessary.

said Stewart Farber, Director of REAP. Farber, a public health and radiation risk assessment scientist who first highlighted the need for a central government registry for military personnel treated with nasal radium irradiation issue in a letter ["Radium Exposure in U.S. Military Personnel"] to the medical and scientific community in 1992 (see Farber, 1992) in the New England Journal of Medicine, has testified twice before Congress on nasal radium irradiation experiments and NRI's later 'standard medical use' on what the CDC has finally been forced to admit is at least 500,000 children and more than 10,000 submariners and aviators.

The Radium Experiment Assessment Project, as one of more than thirty radiation experimental subject and victims' rights groups have joined with the Task Force on Radiation and Human Rights to demand Congressional Oversight Hearings on the "Implementation Plan" announced by the Administration in its wishful "Building Public Trust" report.

As a first step in this process, and given the failures of government and private institutions to act responsibly, the Radium Experiment Assessment Project is requesting that any person who received nasal radium irradiation as part of the Human Radiation Experiment Research Grant B-19 conducted by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and School of Hygiene and Public Health on third grade schoolchildren in Baltimore city schools from July 1948 to November 1954, or any other NRI treated individual desiring a registration form, fact sheet, and annotated bibliography to contact REAP by:

The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) was established by Presidential Executive Order #12891 in January 1994 to investigate "human radiation experiments" conducted the federal government or by private institutions with government funding. ACHRE was forced by private scientists and citizen initiatives [see Bibliography: Farber, 1994(a) - Farber, 1995(d)] to evaluate the experimental use of nasal radium irradiation which revealed one human radiation experiment involving 582 third grader children in Baltimore and in two others involving 7,613 military personnel (see Haines, 1946 and Annals of Otol., 1945). These initial experimental studies on children and veterans using sealed radium applicators to shrink lymphoid tissue met the definition of a "human radiation experiments" as defined by Executive Order #12891 establishing the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group. [See Appendix II].

These early military and civilian nasal radium irradiation experiments conducted in Baltimore reviewed by the ACHRE were too limited in scope and duration to prove the technique safe but became the basis for private physicians and the Department of Defense adopting nasal radium irradiation as a 'standard medical treatment' for childhood middle ear problems (otitis media), or inability to equalize pressure in planes and submarines, that led to its subsequent use on more than 500,000 children and 10,000 veterans after W.W. II. Executive Order #12891 mandates that any "human radiation experiment" such as these initial radium irradiation experiments be reviewed by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to consider whether:

After 17 months of delay, the White House recently released a report detailing the Clinton Administration's planned actions [and failures to act] in response to an "independent" Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) Final Report recommendations on Cold War-era radiation experiments issued in 1995. ACHRE's recommendations and their implementation by the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group (IWG) [see Appendix II for makeup] in the IWG report "Building Public Trust" were claimed by President Clinton to detail the steps the US Government would take to finally "right the wrongs of the past inflicted on unknowing citizens" . The 4,000 human radiation experiments reviewed by ACHRE were carried out or funded by the U.S. Government primarily through the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Energy (DOE, or its predecessor agencies) and were conducted at numerous major medical institutions, including Johns Hopkins Hospital. One experiment conspicuous by its absence from the Clinton Administration's Implementing Report was performed on 582 third graders in the Baltimore public schools who were part of an experiment conducted by Johns Hopkins involving the insertion of metal rods with a sealed capsule of radium-226 termed a Nasopharyngeal Radium Applicator or 'radium rod' used to shrink lymphoid tissue at the opening of the Eustachian tube.

said Dan Burnstein, Esq., President of the Center for Atomic Radiation Studies, Inc. The details as to excess cancer risk for head and neck cancers being 8.4 times the ACHRE threshold for medical notice and follow-up for which people were still alive and might benefit from medical notice and follow-up are included as Appendix II. Although widely criticized on medical and ethical grounds, the ACHRE had maintained in its Oct. 1995 report to the President that of the 4,000 experiments it reviewed involving hundreds of thousands of test subjects: "There is no subject of biomedical experiments for whom there is a need to provide active notice and medical follow-up".

said Stewart Farber, MSPH, Director of the Radium Experiment Assessment Project. ACHRE's own calculation of excess cancer mortality risk [See Appendix II for details] for this experimental group of children who were selected from Baltimore public schools for an experiment to study 'the efficiency of nasopharyngeal [radium] irradiation [NRI] in the prevention of deafness in children' in Research Grant No. B-19 carried out at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and School of Public Health from July 1948 until November 1954 exceeded ACHRE's arbitrary threshold for medical notice and follow-up by more than a factor of 8. This human radiation experiment conducted under Research Grant No. B-19 by Johns Hopkins involved 582 children who were 3rd graders in Baltimore city schools, average age 8.5 years at the time, which would make these individuals about 57 years of age at present. Third graders were screened and selected for this experiment during the fall and winter of 1948-49 and the fall of 1949. 291 were treated with nasal radium applicators, and 291 were treated with "blank" nasal radium applicators as control subjects.

according to Farber.

After the ACHRE report issued in late 1995 recommended against any notification of 582 experiment NRI subjects treated as children by Johns Hopkins or 7,661 veterans treated in early NRI experiments by the Department of Defense in the Army Air Force and Navy submarine service, the Radium Experiment Assessment Project (REAP) was organized as a project of the Center for Atomic Radiation Studies, Inc. (CARS), a Brookline, Mass. based 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to increasing public understanding of issues related to radiation through greater availability of reliable, objective information. REAP was established to research the NRI issue, promote public awareness of its potential health risks, encourage public 'right-to-know' initiatives, and promote proper medical surveillance and follow-up recommendations for treated individuals based on full consideration of the current scientific research and medical knowledge about this treatment. A description of the Radium Experiment Assessment Project - Background & Goals is include as Attachment 1.

Included as Appendix II is a review of the excess cancer risk to NRI treated children based on:

Included as Appendix III is a review of recent examples of how both the public and the medical profession are either receiving no information or distorted information about the health risks of NRI as presently known. These examples include:

This recent attempt by Johns Hopkins to placate current public concerns based on inaccurate claims regarding, and even apparent denial of, the actual findings of their own original research on NRI health effects on cancer and other nonmalignant conditions is reprehensible and should be rebuked and investigated by the scientific community and the U.S. Congress as a case of scientific fraud on a major public health issue..

said Fran Kenneally, a 50 year old woman treated eight times with nasal radium irradiation as a 6 to 8 year old child in the 1950s. Fran Kenneally suffered six miscarriages and gave birth to a brain damaged son before being diagnosed with a pituitary tumor at age 37 in 1984. Had Fran known of the high radium irradiation dose to the pituitary and health effects reviewed in the unpublished Sandler, 1980 report which documented a high rate of thyroid problems suspected as being related to pituitary irradiation and hormonal dysfunction, her hormonal problems would probably have led to much earlier detection of her pituitary tumor which caused a lifetime of suffering, said Stewart Farber. Fran testified before Congress at a Senate Hearing on "Assessing the Effects of Nasal Radium Treatments" [S. Hrg 103-822, August 29, 1994] and later served on a panel of experts and NRI stakeholders at a CDC/VA sponsored workshop held in September 1995 on "The Public Health Response to Nasal Radium Irradiation".

When President Clinton accepted the Final Report and recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in a ceremony at the White House he stated:

-President Clinton

October 3, 1995

according to the Radium Experiment Assessment Project's Stewart Farber.