MS. MARLOW: My name is Sandra Marlow. I'm the daughter of Colonel Nicholas Kane. In 1948 he was part of the radiation lab school monitoring what I found out later by myself was contaminated ships brought back from the 1946 tests in Bikini. In 1955, he was an observer in the desert with particles of sand, desert rock, Teapot Series.

I'd like to address several questions and several comments to the gentlemen at the end who I suspect forgot that there was a doctor called Mengele who had a large staff who were concerned about effects of various medications, both for national security and to help the medical and very intelligent system in Germany and Austria.

I say kaddish for my father every December. For those who don't know what that means, it's a prayer for the dead. It's a Jewish prayer. My father would be proud of me to be here. He was a colonel. He was a professional. And he said I should never discuss politics. Well, I am.

First, money. I'd like to know -- you can't give the information now -- the total costs of medical research that has been done during the Cold War at the universities all over the United States and within all of the departments that existed. I don't -- I think you'll need a committee to do that.

I'd like to have representation of those of us who, because of our expertise in trying to find the truth, have found documents that would help your Committee that you have not looked at.

Medical care and notification. My father might have lived longer, as would have thousands and hundreds of thousands of the military personnel, if we knew. We knew. My father knew about radiation. If we knew that the government was conducting studies to see the effects. He could have had a transfusion and we would have saved to make sure that the blood that he got wasn't contaminated.

And the medical profession could have helped their veterans by providing decent blood for their men. There were 28 men who were at the test -- I'll calm down -- in 1954, hydrogen test. Before one of them died -- and I forgot all their names. They were desperately trying to find the other 28. I became a librarian because I couldn't get the truth from every single agency of this government except my congressman and my senator tried to help.

I found evidence in Food and Drug that these 28 men were being surveyed and they weren't followed up. They weren't monitored. They were never told. And they might have also died. And this is the psychological thing for people who have been raped. It's admitting the truth to the veterans especially of what happened and showing compassion helps, in what is the '90s concern about mind and medicine, mind and medicine.

And the psychological grief of the veterans is probably the most horrendous thing of any person. And there have been some studies made on them with their consent with counseling on dealing with a government that they loved and would willingly died for that had lied to them.

Third. Health -- we need to be told to help. Information? We can get the information if you let us. There were all kinds of databases. As Janet says, you know where people were. The fire in St. Louis had a computer system set up before the fire with data on informing people and following up veterans' twins. You have told us nothing and never given us an opportunity to ask or have equal rights on a panel of our peers.

And if I seem sexist, I'm an artist. I became a librarian. But the most important thing to many of us has not been addressed by your Committee. And there was lots of research. I'll be glad to share it with you if you help cover my personal xerox costs and time.

The genetic studies. I don't know if you know Dr. Boggs. Any of you remember Dr. Boggs who worked on the Manhattan Project? His wife is now head of the downs syndrome. Many of the people who have been involved in nuclear weapons have children with birth defects.

And we have a document from England addressed about the concern -- about permissible genetic damage was needed in order to be done, otherwise it would impede the development of the AEC. There were genetic studies made. There is no need to say a cost of human life of your child and the increase of birth defects has a price. The price of a human life is very valuable. There is no money that can pay for it.

MR. BIBEAU: Ambassador -- is it DeBrun?

MR. DEBRUN: Thank you.

This is to all the panel members. I'm listening to what suggestions U.S. citizens can give to the U.S. government to address the need of radiation victims. DOE won't turn over our medical records. The Marshallese radiation victims are no longer considered Americans. We have no Congressman. What are we supposed to do?

Thank you.

MR. BIBEAU: A couple of questions that have been raised by Janet Gordon was are you going to deal with the victims as human beings. You know, will we have rights as citizens. That's one of the questions that I've had myself.

Margaret gave what I think you could respond to. Would anybody care to at this time?

MR. EGILMAN: I just want to respond to their previous response to that issue.

Dr. Egilman. Thanks.

They can tell by the volume.

(Laughter.)

Or the accent.

The previous response that you've heard from Dr. Galson and some others is, well, gee, there's so many victims. If we had only done 20 or 30, then we'd give them some stuff. And that's what the Committee really did. They got in there. Okay. These 20, we'll give them stuff.

But we radiated so many people. We did so much damage. It's going to cost so much. We need a discount. It's called a mass murder discounting program. If we had just killed a couple of hundred people, okay. We'll give you some health care. We'll take care of it. No problem. But we killed so many people, we can't afford it. If we'd only killed a few less, it wouldn't have been a problem.

I'm sympathetic to the mass murder discounting problem but I don't think it justifies not doing what you're supposed to do.

MR. SELIGMAN: Any other comments?

MR. FARBER: Hi. I just want to reemphasize before we leave it, the point that there has to be proper scientific representation of -- called the stakeholders, since we're here, on these panels. There wasn't on the Advisory Committee. The so-called -- if you look at the recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist for the January-February issue about the Advisory Committee report, the woman who was designated as the representation of the public, when asked about it, didn't even know she was the representative of the public. She was quoted.

If this new group goes forward for ethics or whatever it's called, if there isn't proper representation that can bring meaningful scientific input forward, the issues are going to be ignored. The discussion will be constrained.

I saw this at the workshop at Yale on the nasal radium follow-up. I was specifically excluded from the panel. I was told, despite scientific rule of bringing the issue forward, the title of my talk was changed without any notification, anyone even asking me.

When I asked about it, I was told, don't worry about it. You'll have your 15 minutes on your soapbox. They're still calling the increase in brain cancer observed in children a small increase.

The VA, in a recent commentary in JAMA, calls a 5.3-fold excess of brain cancer, per the National Academy of Sciences, a small increase in brain cancer, not really all that big a deal.

The facts are going to be ignored and there's only one study in this country of this. If we can't come to some consensus on one study of one issue that shows a five-fold excess of brain cancer, an eight-fold excess of thyroid disorder, and the facts are even-handedly reviewed, then we're just wasting our time writing 900 page reports.

There has to be proper review. There has to be a mechanism to bring discussion forward and it has to be an open discussion and not some kind of shell game that went on at Yale at that workshop.

MR. SEA: Geoffrey Sea.

Dr. Galson, pay attention -- and Dr. O'Toole, because at the end I'm going to ask you if you understood what I've just read to you. I'm also going to give this to you in writing in large print.

You may not know that the Advisory Committee said that some people may have not been advised of their responsibilities because the print was too small, the Nuremberg Code.

This is from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty to which the United States became a signatory in 1992. It says each state party to the covenant undertakes: A, to ensure that any person whose rights as herein recognized are violated shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity. B, to ensure that any person claiming such remedy shall have his right thereto determined by competent judicial administrative or legislative authorities or by any other competent authority provided for by the legal system of the state or to develop the possibilities of judicial remedy. And C, to ensure that the competent authority shall enforce such remedies when granted.

Now, I don't see anything in there about unless it's too expensive. I don't see anything in there about unless it's for national security. I don't see anything in there about unless it's for the advance of medical science. I don't see anything in there about unless it's not politically expedient.

Do you two understand what I've just read to you? Did you hear it?

DR. GALSON: Yes.

MR. SEA: Thank you.

MR. SELIGMAN: Tara, would you like to respond?

DR. O'TOOLE: I'm Tara O'Toole from the Department of Energy. Clearly there's an enormous amount of deep felt emotion in the room today and I'm feeling some of it, too, to tell you the truth. I do think it is somewhat unfair to compare Steven Galson who has spent the last three years of his life trying to find justice for human radiation experiments, however imperfectly the quest, to Dr. Mengele.

Those kinds of ad hominem attacks don't help us. We have to try in the next 24 to 48 hours to come together here. There's too much divisiveness in the room. There's too much name-calling in the room, David and Geoff. There's too much us and them in the room.

We've got to get beyond this, people. This is not our report. We are government employees in here. I'm a political appointee. I'm the only political appointee in the room, so blame me, if you need be. But we need to try and formulate useful -- as useful as possible within the context of the recommendations -- useful responses to these recommendations.

We want to hear from you about what you think are the major flaws in the report. But understand our charge and our limitations. Understand also how the U.S. government works. One of the reasons we're in such profound difficulty in this country is people don't know how to use their government, and they don't. It's true. A lot of us do not know how you go out and how you lobby our committees for money to serve the causes that you believe important.

Richard Miller has spent many hours of his life in the last three years trying to get money in the budget for many of the things that our office does, including worker monitoring studies. And he has been modestly successful, much less successful than I would wish.

But it is not sufficient to simply point out a wrong and say fix it. What we're about today and tomorrow is trying to formulate real steps towards righting that wrong, not just rhetoric, but real steps of how we can go forward together.

We do not have all of the answers and we realize how imperfect the landscape in which we operate. But, please, let's try to go forward together.

MS. GORDON: I would just like to say, since I yelled at you already, that -- I'm Janet Gordon and I am a citizen. And we -- the personal attacks, I apologize for. And for all of you MD's and Ph.D.'s, I would again apologize if you took offense. But I don't take back my request that you as a working group please do not assume that MD means major deity. And you want us to come together. We want to come together. We have been working for decades and we have been working in the system.

I've spent my hours on the Hill. I probably can count my hours and triple what Richard Miller has done and many of you. And I have the varicose veins to show for it.

But I would say that if we're going to come together, I have to repeat once more. Are we coming together as equals? Are we real citizens? Are we equal human beings?

Well, we haven't been treated as equal human beings. You decide whether or not we get notified that we've been exposed or what our damage is. You get to decide whether the interpretation of what the damage was is what -- if it's real. We know what our experience is. We know when our children are defective. We know when the experiences that we've had don't jibe with the, quote, statistics.

Statistics tend to be manipulated by the people who are operating the programs and the changes that have occurred in the decades that we have been working on this issue have altered so dramatically I can't even tell you.

It took us a decade to get recognized that we even were there, let alone that there had been any problem. But the recognitions are changing. Thank god, the recognitions are changing. But you're still saying are you entitled to ge notified. That's a basic citizen right. You have no right to make that recommendation in that Committee. That totally erases us as full-fledged citizens at the table.

It totally erases us as full participants. And so I would say to you, yes, we are here seriously. We've made some jokes. We've made some attacks. And for those, if you've taken offense, we apologize. We are serious. We are deadly, deadly serious.

And we are here to do the job and we will do the job with you. And the problem won't go away. We will continue to be here. And the problem doesn't get smaller or cheaper by ignoring it. It will never get smaller or cheaper by ignoring it.

MR. SELIGMAN: David, you want one comment?

MR. EGILMAN: I wanted to respond to -- my name got called. I just want to respond because my name got called.

COL. BAILEY: Well, that's it. We've got to adhere to status.

MR. EGILMAN: Well, my name got called. I'd like to be able to respond to my name.

COL. BAILEY: We've got to have some time management. That was the last comment.

We'll get back in an hour and --

MS. CAMPOS-INFANTINO: 1:30.

COL. BAILEY: -- 1:30.

MR. EGILMAN: Is my mike off? Did you pay for my mike, as Ronald Reagan said? Okay.

We came here --

COL. BAILEY: Dave, --

MR. EGILMAN: We came here with solutions. We mentioned them. Two and three of the Taskforce report call for notification and medical monitoring. So we didn't come here to complain. We came here with our position. It's laid out. It's been laid out for over a year. We want those things discussed and approved.

COL. BAILEY: Okay, Dave. You got the last work.

MR. EGILMAN: Thank you.

MR. SELIGMAN: I want to, before we break up, thank the panelists for coming.

Before we leave, we have an announcement, please.

COL. BAILEY: Administrative announcement. The 1:30 panel, meet at the rear of the room with Susan Mather before you leave, please.

(Whereupon, the luncheon recess was taken at 12:25 p.m.)

AFTERNOON SESSION

[1:30 p.m.] 

MS. MATHER: Colonel Bailey has told me it's time to get started and I know how the boss is here.

I'm Susan Mather. I'm the Chief Public Health and Environmental Hazards Officer at VA and I work in the Veterans Health Administration which deals with the health effects of radiation as one of our duties.

We have a full panel, as you can see, so I don't think you really want to hear from me. You want to hear from the panelists. And we'll get started according to the program.

We have, as I say, a very full panel representing some government agencies. And we're specifically addressing Recommendations 5 and 6 and the government's response to them.

Recommendation 5, as you know, asked the government to work with Congress to amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 to cover other exposed populations, including Hanford. And Recommendation 6 dealt with updating the epidemiologic tables that govern relief for veterans and also to improve the administration of current laws governing compensation.

On our panel today we have Dr. Neil Otchin who works in my office and who deals specifically with radiation cases.

And because VA has two arms, one is the Health administration and the other is the Benefits Administration, we also have Don England here who's representing Veterans Benefits Administration that administers the benefits law.

We have Joan Ma Pierre who is the Director of the Electronic Systems and the Defense Nuclear Agency. We work very closely with the Defense Nuclear Agency in exposure data information.

Henry Falk, who is the Director of the Center for Environmental Health in HHS.

Then we have Lincoln Grafhis, who is the National Association of Radiation Survivors.

Oscar Rosen -- oh, I'm sorry. Then Anthony Guarisco, who is the Alliance of Atomic Veterans and Dr. Oscar Rosen, who is the National Association of Atomic Veterans.

And then Pat Broudy - I'm sorry. (Correcting pronunciation.) And I should know that. I've heard of Pat Broudy. This is the first time I've actually met you but I've heard of you for many years. Pat Broudy, who is a very articulate spokesperson for Atomic Veterans, the National Association of Atomic Veterans.

And Walter Dasheno, who is the Lieutenant Governor of the Santa Clara branch of the Pueblo Nation.

And then we're waiting for Brenda Weaver, but because the time is so short, we're going to get started and we're going to start with Dr. Otchin discussing the Department of Veterans Affairs response. And also, Don England will have some comments about compensation within seven minutes.

MR. OTCHIN: I'm Neil Otchin. I serve as the Program Chief for Clinical Matters in Dr. Mather's office, which is the Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards in the Veterans Health Administration, and I would like to provide some background information and some comments regarding the first part of the Advisory Committee Recommendation Number 6.

The Advisory Committee recommends that serious consideration be given to reviewing and updating epidemiological tables used to adjudicate many veterans VA radiation claims. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine definitely whether or not a cancer or other condition developing in a person exposed to ionizing radiation was due to that exposure or to some other factor or to the background rate for that disease.

The most that can be provided scientifically is the estimate of the probability or likelihood that these can be attributed to radiation. This concept is sometimes called probability of causation.

The radio-epidemiological tables originally were published by the National Institutes of Health in 1985 and were intended to show the probability that certain cancers could have resulted from previous radiation exposure. However, the format of the radio-epidemiological tables made it difficult to relate to the VA criteria of no reasonable possibility and at least as likely as not, as well as to the VA reasonable doubt policy.

Therefore, the Committee on Interagency Radiation Research and Policy Coordination subsequently used the data in the NIH tables as a basis for developing screening doses. If a veteran's exposure dose did not exceed the applicable screening dose, then there is only a low statistical probability that the particular disease can be attributed to radiation exposure in service.

Conversely, if a veteran's exposure dose does exceed the screen, then there's at least a small statistical chance that the disease can be attributed to exposure to ionizing radiation in the absence of other significant risk factors.

However, the original NIH radio-epidemiological tables and the CRRIPC report -- that's the acronym for that long title I gave you -- does not include all the diseases that the VA now accepts as being potentially radiogenic.

Also, additional scientific data may have become available about disease that are included in the original reports which may warrant changes to the tables and the screening values.

In 1994, the VA requested that the CRRIPC report be updated and expanded but were told that this was not feasible until the radio-epidemiological tables themselves were revised. Currently, the VA has established and Interagency Working Group to consider the desirability and most feasible approach to updating the radio-epidemiological tables.

This committee is chaired by the VA's Undersecretary for Benefits and includes representatives from the Department of Defense and Health and Human Services. We expect this panel to submit its report by the end of Spring 1996.

As Dr. Mather told you, the VA is sort of divided into two major parts. I'm on the health part of the VA and, because I'm not directly involved in adjudicating benefits claims, we've asked Mr. Don England of the Veterans Benefits Administration to provide some comments on the second part of the Advisory Committee Recommendation 6 which deals with adjudication processes for atomic veterans and related issues.

Don?

MR. ENGLAND: Thank you, Neil.

My name is Don England. I work with the Compensation and Pension Service from the Veterans Benefits Administration. I work mainly with regulations, and what I'll do is just give you just a short overview of the statutory and regulatory system under which we currently administer benefits to atomic veterans.

In fact, I'll take things sort of in reverse order.

In 1988, Congress enacted what was called the Radiation Exposed Veterans Compensation Act of 1988 and under that law there are several conditions which Congress lists and says that if a veteran was at Hiroshima, Nagasaki or had been a prisoner of war where he may have been exposed to radiation at Hiroshima or Nagasaki or if a veteran had been present at one of the atmospheric nuclear tests within specified periods, that presence in one of those situations during military service and subsequent development of any of the conditions that Congress listed, that we will assume those conditions are due to radiation and we will pay compensation.

The other law which affects that was a few years earlier. It was 1984. It's called the Veterans Dioxin and Radiation Exposure Compensation Standards Act. That law created an advisory committee called the Veterans Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards which was to advise the Administrator, now the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, on conditions it felt were related to radiation exposure based on its review of the published scientific literature.

Under those regulations as they're currently structured, if you have a radiogenic disease, in other words, a disease that can be induced by radiation, we need to verify your exposure to radiation during military service and we also in most cases get a dose assessment from the Nuclear Test Personnel Review from the Department -- or the Defense Nuclear Agency. And based on that, we get a medical opinion as to whether or not that amount of radiation to which someone was exposed was sufficient to -- or whether it's at least las likely as not that that dose could be the cause of the current condition. And based on that, we determine whether people are entitled to VA benefits.

MS. MATHER: Thank you. I think that gives a lead-in then to the Defense Nuclear Agency and the dose determination activities.

MS. MaPIERRE: Good afternoon. I'm Joan MaPierre and I'm the Director for Electronics and Systems at the Defense Nuclear Agency. I am here today primarily in my capacity as the Director of the Department of Defense's Radiation Experiment Command Center, but I know there's much interest on the Nuclear Test Personnel Review and I do want to acknowledge that DNA is the DOD's executive agent for the Nuclear Test Personnel Review.

Following the initiation of the Human Radiation Experiment Project in December of '93, most of the Departments very quickly got involved with the process of looking for records that might be of interest to these experiments. And so in February of 1994, the Department of Defense established the Radiation Effects Command Center.

Within the Department of Defense, this activity is being managed by the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Atomic Energy. The Secretary of Defense delegated this to Dr. Harold Smith and I work for Dr. Smith. And I am also ably assisted by the Deputy Director of the Radiation Effects Command Center that I would like to acknowledge. This is our moderator today, Dr. Claud Bailey.

COL. BAILEY: She's my boss.

MS. MaPIERRE: Actually, I work for him.

Let me tell you a few things that we, as recall ourselves, the RECC -- not wreck. Let me tell you a few things that the RECC has done since February of '94.

First of all, we are proud to be a member of the Interagency Working Group that's chaired by Dr. Tara O'Toole of the Department of Energy. And under the RECC, we have worked both with the constituents themselves, as well as provide support to the Interagency Working Group. In particular, the RECC gives us the opportunity to coordinate all human radiation experiment related activities amongst the services and the Department of Defense agencies.

We conducted extensive examinations and review of the relevant documentation. And I'm sure that many of you can appreciate the fact that it's not always easy to go back and look for records that go back to the '40s, but I can tell you as one who is heavily involved in this that everyone on the team, certainly in the DOD as with the other departments, gave it their best effort.

We reviewed records that were made available through the services and the agencies, as well as records that we found in the National Archives and the National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland.

We also undertook a major effort to very rapidly declassify 1200 documents in real time and many of you may recall that the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments had a finite time. And as they were working, they needed to be brought up to speed very quickly. So the RECC accomplished the support of what we call the ACHRE by making documents available in real time as we were uncovering them and declassifying them as quickly as possible.

In summary, let me say that we identified on the order of 2,600 possible -- and I underscore the word possible -- DOD sponsored activities which might be characterized as human radiation experiments. And that's a very large number. But I do want to emphasize that given the press of time, our philosophy was to err on the side of inclusion. And you can imagine when you have hundreds of people at different sites looking for records, we gave them essentially a key word list and if it looked like it could possibly fit, we included it.

And as time has gone on, of course, many of those originally identified appear not to really be in the category of a bona fide radiation experiment. But nevertheless, all the documents that have been found have been transferred to the RECC.

Since February of '94, we've processed over 7,000 requests from the constituents. And I want to emphasize that our primary goal is to serve the public and to make those records available.

And so on that note, I would like to give you Colonel Bailey's phone number if you wish to call in and ask anything that I may not have had a chance to touch upon. So the number is area code 702-442-5675.

So thank you very much.

MS. MATHER: All right. We'll go right on to Dr. Falk, then.