
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 20, 1991                   TAG: 9103200245
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium

RADIATION LINKED TO WORKER DEATHS/ STUDY EXAMINED TENN. NUCLEAR PLANT

The longest study of its kind suggests that fatal cancers linked to radiation exposure can take a quarter-century to become evident among nuclear plant workers.

A separate study, however, found that people living near such plants had no greater risk of getting fatal cancers than other people.

In the first study, published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, epidemiologist Steve Wing of the University of North Carolina and fellow researchers studied all 1,524 deaths from 1943 to 1984 among the 8,318 white male workers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Women and non-whites were excluded because they had fewer deaths and lower radiation exposure, the researchers said.

The men had been hired at the Tennessee installation from 1943 to 1972. Twenty years after they began working at the plant, the workers' death rate from all causes increased 2.68 percent per radiation dose over what would have been expected with no radiation exposure, the researchers reported.

The data shows the Oak Ridge workers were 21 percent less likely to develop a fatal cancer than the general public. The authors explain that by saying the workers are in better health than most people.

"This, I think, is the longest-term exposure ever studied," said William R. Hendee, AMA vice president of science and technology.

The second study, financed by the National Cancer Institute, examined all cancer deaths in 107 counties near U.S. nuclear plants and compared them to cancer deaths in 292 counties far from nuclear installations.

The authors showed that from 1950 to 1984 people living near the 62 nuclear plants surveyed were not any more likely to develop a fatal cancer.

In the Oak Ridge study, most of the increased death rate came from cancer deaths, which were 4.94 percent higher than they would have been without radiation exposure. "The higher the radiation exposure the higher the [cancer] mortality," Wing said.

Previous studies have lasted up to 21 years and have failed to show such a pattern, Wing said.

by CNB