De Marco said the Government needed to make public records that include employees' names so that researchers could determine the parts of the plant where individuals worked. He said researchers were also trying to estimate the doses of radiation that each Fernald worker received to make it easier to link a certain level of exposure to a specific type of tumor. Gartside's work was part of an extensive scientific and medical evaluation of Fernald workers that his firm was making in preparation for the trial. Paul De Marco, a lawyer representing workers, said Dr. Gartside also found that the median life expectancy of Fernald workers was 58 years, five years less than the median life expectancy of all Americans from 1953 to 1991. Blood and lymph cancers caused 48 deaths, 17 more than predicted. ![]() Lung and other respiratory cancers claimed 153 Fernald workers, 26 more than predicted. He evaluated the cause of death of 1,371 Fernald workers who died from 1953 to 1991 and found that 113 died of colon, liver and other gastrointestinal cancers, 30 more than his statistical model predicted. Gartside's findings confirm, in part, these unpublished data. In an internal memorandum from 1988, another Oak Ridge epidemiologist said that seven Fernald workers had died of liver cancer. In a 1986 study by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, an Energy Department contractor in Tennessee, researchers identified what they called a "trend" involving what seemed to be unusual rates of colon cancer among Fernald workers. NLO and the Government have compiled extensive records on virtually all the more than 7,000 people who worked at the plant for more than 90 days, including several internal studies done in the 1960's and the 1980's. That medical landscape, though, is rich in data that the Government has resisted making public. Gartside compared Fernald workers to the general United States population, while Dr. Howe could be explained in part by the fact that they used different comparison populations: Dr. The differences between the findings of Dr. Gartside's findings could merit more attention.Įpidemiology is a devishly tricky undertaking, medical specialists say, even in the best of circumstances. ![]() O'Toole noted, for example, that there were too few people in the study to draw firm conclusions about cancer rates. Tara O'Toole, a doctor who is Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environment, Safety and Health, said Dr. "He found that this workforce has a much lower incidence of disease than the general population." Howe found that there is no excess of cancer in the workforce at this facility," said Kevin Van Wart, a lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, which is representing NLO. Geoffrey Howe of the National Cancer Institute of Canada. The NLO evaluation was completed earlier this year by Dr. Gartside's findings were immediately criticized as inaccurate by a lawyer for NLO, which conducted its own study using similar data and found nothing unusual about the health of Fernald workers or the incidence of cancer deaths among them.
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