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ORRHES Meeting Minutes
December 2, 2003
Presentation by Dr. Paul Charp
DR. CHARP: I’m going to condense the several hundred pages of
the health assessment down into one overhead. You’re probably asking
why did I have to read the two hundred pages if you’re going to
only do it in one, but such is life. This overhead, as I said, is a summary
of all the exposures that ATSDR evaluated for the Uranium releases from
Y-12. This includes past exposures and current exposures. The past exposures
were evaluated based on the State of Tennessee’s dose reconstruction
project that was overseen by the ORHASP Steering Panel. What ATSDR did,
as well as what the State did, was look at the chemical and radiological
issues associated with Uranium exposures. We looked at total pathways
which would include air, water, soil, and all that information that were
summarized in the dose reconstruction project and, based on what was in
those documents, we determined that, for radiation people were being exposed
and that was true also for the chemical aspects of Uranium exposure. People
were being exposed both through inhalation and through the ingestion pathway.
What we did differently from the State is whereas the dose reconstruction
project and the State report was carried out to fifty-two years of exposure,
we tacked on an additional eighteen years. So, we carried it up to seventy
years of exposure. And based on that increased exposure we estimated that
the average radiological dose that was received by a member of the public
was a hundred and fifty-five millirem over seventy years. We used a screening
value for cancer of five thousand millirem over seventy years, which is
a topic of a whole other discussion that may or may not come up today.
And based on our evaluation, the hundred and fifty-five millirem over
seventy years was about thirty-two times lower than our cancer screening
value. In the case of the chemical exposure to Uranium, Uranium is a heavy
metal and as such it has a chemical effect on the kidneys. We looked at
the kidney problems for ingestion and inhalation and also the problems
of Uranium exposure to the lung. Based on inhalation it was about one
hundred thirty times lower than ATSDR’s minimal risk level, MRL,
for inhalation. You see the MRL is listed as eight micrograms per cubic
meter of air and our evaluation, based on the state dose reconstruction,
was a maximum of about six times ten to the minus five milligrams per
cubic meter. That’s point zero, no, point zero six micrograms per
cubic meter. So, it’s about a hundred thirty times lower than the
MRL. In the case of ingestion, the Uranium would be ingested through food,
soil, water, so on, be absorbed, and the Uranium would be deposited in
the kidneys. Based on that pathway the maximum amount we found was, this
converts to about thirteen micrograms of Uranium per kilogram body weight
per day. The ATSDR MRL is two micrograms per kilogram body weight per
day. The issue here is that yes, it’s above ATSDR’s minimal
risk level for ingestion, but just because it’s above the minimal
risk level does not mean you will have an adverse health effect. If you
notice, it says that all the doses here were less than the dose at which
renal health effects have been observed in the most sensitive mammalian
species and I believe that was the rabbit. Where are the toxicology folks
here? Was that the rabbit, Jack, for Uranium? Ingestion past, yeah, the
rabbit. Remember, for the MRL’s ATSDR adds additional safety factors
so although the minimum dose at which adverse health effects were seen
were .05 micrograms per kilogram per day, by the time ATSDR added in the
safety factors it knocked it down to the two micrograms. Yes, Tony?
DR. ANTHONY MALINAUSKAS: What is the limits of uncertainty on all of
these numbers?
DR. CHARP: On the ASTDR numbers?
DR. MALINAUSKAS: Well, on the estimated doses you’re quoting them
out to three decimal places.
DR. CHARP: They’re the same number of significant figures that
were expressed, I believe, in the dose reconstruction project.
DR. MALINAUSKAS: But is the uncertainty a factor of two, a factor of
ten, a factor of a thousand?
DR. CHARP: I can’t tell you that off the top of my head. I doubt
if it’s much more than ten, but don’t quote me on that.
DR. MALINAUSKAS: Well, some of those are fairly close. If it is a factor
of a hundred and it’s thirty-two times less you’ve got an
altogether different situation.
DR. CHARP: Yeah, I agree. Remember, there are uncertainty factors included
in the ATSDR MRL’s that could be as much as a thousand or so above,
below the lowest observed adverse effect level. Al?
MR. BROOKS: It seems that we’re using the term uncertainty factor
here with two meanings. As I understand it these numbers are conservative
estimates and as such they should be at the conservative bounds of the
values, whereas uncertainty is usually referred to as an estimate of the
validity of the central measure. If these things have a safety factor
of a thousand in them the question of uncertainty becomes almost meaningless.
DR. MALINAUSKAS: When you start quoting three decimal places I think
you’ve got to clarify your position.
DR. CHARP: Right, in some cases you’re absolutely right about the
significant figures. One versus 1.0 is a big difference. Barbara?
MS. SONNENBURG: I have a different subject if you’re done with
that one.
MR. HANLEY: Responding to your question, Tony, we’re trying to
put this all on one slide but in the health assessment we explain where
we see the uncertainties and the conservatism built into the assessment
and we actually describe that, for example, that past exposures were based
on, for the Scarboro community, were actually based on East Fork Poplar
Creek sediment samples, which is unlikely to happen. And those are estimated
to be at least, the flood plain samples were at least an order of magnitude
higher than what was found at Scarboro. So, we had a list of conservative
aspects in these estimates. Also, these comparison values have safety
factors built into them also. So, the document provides much more detail.
Paul is just trying here to capture it all on one slide and keep it simple.
MS. SONNENBURG: Going back to the document we looked at before, is there
any medical data included in your work?
DR. CHARP: In the health assessment there is a section on toxicological
implications and–
MS. SONNENBURG: No, I’m talking about people. Looking at figures
about the health of people, medical data.
DR. CHARP: Jack will answer that.
MR. HANLEY: I was going to get into that a little more in detail later
and I can do that.
MS. SONNENBURG: Ok, I can wait.
MR. HANLEY: But just to answer the questions, in estimating these doses
in exposure pathway, no, health outcome data was not used. However, the
document summarizes a number of investigations and studies that did occur
over the last ten, fifteen years.
MS. SONNENBURG: But in all those studies very few of them looked at people?
MR. HANLEY: No.
MS. SONNENBURG: What you did, the soil and the air and so forth and so
on, but I haven’t seen very much that looked at people.
MR. HANLEY: There are sections in there where there are investigations
and evaluations of people and health outcome data and I’ll point
those out to you later.
DR. CEMBER: I’d just like to recommend a book that was written
by Alan Brodsky that deals with Uranium and the hazards from Uranium and
he cites numerous studies on individuals and on populations who had been
exposed and overexposed to Uranium and describes the quantitative relationships
between the dose and the response, etc. So Alan Brodsky wrote that and
let me recommend that and get it into the record here.
DR. CHARP: That’s B-r-o-d-s-k-y I believe. And also related to
that in the last few years the World Health Organization IARC, International
Agency for Cancer Research, IARC, just classified Uranium as a non-human
carcinogen. It does not cause cancer in humans, natural Uranium. Any other
questions on this before I go to the last column, the conclusion category?
MS. SONNENBURG: What about the changed uranium?
DR. CHARP: Enriched Uranium?
MS. SONNENBURG: Yeah.
DR. CHARP: Enriched Uranium, once you get above an enrichment of ten
to fifteen percent, I believe, you start having a radiological problem
versus a chemical problem. So, if you’ve ingested enriched uranium
then you have to take into account the radiological issues and not the
chemical carcinogenic issue.
MS. SONNENBURG: So, for Oak Ridge, original uranium really doesn’t–
DR. CHARP: The uranium that came into the facility, the ore, would not
be considered a carcinogen. The enriched uranium that came from K-25 or
Y-12, depending on the level of enrichment, could. And also since K-25
also used recycled uranium then you’re going to have to take into
account some of the other contaminants that may be in there.
MR. L.C. MANLEY: What about depleted uranium, especially the metals?
That thing they have given the people in Desert Storm such problem?
DR. CHARP: From a radiological issue depleted uranium is, pure depleted
uranium, is about one half as radioactive as natural uranium.
MR. MANLEY: But the metal is an alloy.
DR. CHARP: Metal is an alloy–
MR. MANLEY: Therefore, you’ve got other things that could cause
a physical problem.
DR. CHARP: Right. There has been a study going on by someone at the,
I think she’s at Hopkins, Melissa McDiarmid, who has been looking
at soldiers from Desert Storm that have embedded uranium projectile pieces
in their body that cannot be removed through surgery and thus far the
only problems they have seen has been, I believe, elevated uranium in
the urine and no other problems.
MR. WASHINGTON: That’s not exactly true, is it? You’re talking
about heavy metals so when you say no problem that really isn’t
exactly true, is it?
DR. CHARP: Exact words, no, that’s not exactly true. No reported
problems, no diagnosed problems, no observed problems other than carrying
around some depleted uranium. The same thing would occur, as I understand
it, from people who have been shot with bullets that can’t have
the bullets removed.
MR. WASHINGTON: Oh, if it’s still in there, yeah, but if it’s
finally divided then you have an additional problem, don’t you?
Because you’re talking about not only whether it’s depleted
or enriched. Even if it’s depleted you’re talking about a
heavy metal and that heavy metal has the ability to go places that other
things don’t generally go. It’s going to act kind of like
lead in some respect.
DR. CHARP: I don’t know all the toxicology of the heavy metals.
The only thing I do remember hearing McDiarmid talk about is when these
depleted uranium fragments are in the body there’s some type of,
like a cyst forms around the particles, and the particles fully abcess.
MR. WASHINGTON: I can agree with that.
DR. CHARP: So, I don’t know what the answer is to your question.
I would assume some of these metals do leach out into the circulation,
but currently there hasn’t been any detected problems associated
with that.
DR. DAVIDSON: I would just like to make one statement that, you know,
if you have heavy metals and if they are localized within a certain area,
if they’re in the urine that means they’re mobilized. If they
appear in the urine that means they’re mobilized in the body and
they have a potential to distribute to the body, so which means if the
person is being exposed because otherwise it could not be excreted.
MR. MANLEY: The depleted uranium, not only that the metal, it burns,
oxides rapidly and it burns easily. So, therefore, there are more ways
to get into the system other than by, you know, fragments. So, you can
inhale it very easily.
DR. CHARP: I believe they’ve also looked at the inhalation pathway.
I know the military army up at Aberdeen proving grounds actually has built
a building where they can fire a depleted uranium tank round into the
building and collect all the fragments and they can measure the air particulate
distribution within the building. So, they’ve begun to model the
particulate size and the vaporization of the projectiles inside the buildings.
That study is going on as you speak.
MR. WASHINGTON: That was the outcome of my patent. The Penetrator is
my patent. The Penetrator is really not a weapon per se, it’s just
a hunk of depleted uranium with an explosive on it. It hits the tank,
the momentum goes in and what blows up really is the ammunition inside
the tank.
DR. CHARP: All the Penetrator does is punch a hole in it.
MR. WASHINGTON: Right.
DR. CHARP: It’s a fancy hole puncher at a density of about twenty
grams per cubic centimeter.
MS. ADKINS: I just wanted to check in simple terms are we connected in
any way to the research with the Persian Gulf soldiers who came back supposedly
exposed to dust, and so forth, and who have bizarre symptoms of, just
all kinds of bizarre symptoms. I’m sure there’s a study going
on of those people. Are we connected in any way to that?
DR. CHARP: This person, Melissa McDiarmid, has been looking at the depleted
uranium issues with the soldiers. Is she still a member of the ATSDR Board
of Scientific Counselors? She is. She is the Chair.
MR. WASHINGTON: When these studies are going, it’s kind of like
agent orange. Agent orange, you know, when it first began, when they first
began to study it, you know, nobody was hurt in any way by Agent Orange,
but as years went by, you know, scientists soon became a little more credible
and they began to tell the truth about it. I believe they’re doing
the same thing about the Penetrator because people ate around this stuff.
You know, they were in the field. They were eating, drinking, and doing
all the sleeping around this stuff and that to me, the study, the first
studies that they did it just doesn’t fit my rationalization of
what happens to a heavy metal, you know, when you vaporize it.
DR. CHARP: Let me go on.
DR. DAVIDSON: Don has a question, but we need to get back on the subject.
DR. CHARP: Let me say one more thing to Mr. Washington and then we can
ask the other question, alright? The U.S. uranium and trans-uranium registries
has been following a number of DOE workers who worked in several uranium
plants including the big uranium plants at Hanford and when I last talked
to the former director of that registry they had not yet found any long-term
effects of uranium on these workers who had massive doses of uranium documented
in their bodies. Herman, do you want to add anything to that?
DR. CEMBER: No, you’ve covered it except that these studies you’re
talking about were autopsy studies. So, they analyzed the various tissues
for uranium and then looked at the medical histories of those persons
and they found no relationship between, so far I believe, haven’t
found any relationships between the symptoms that they, the medical history
and the uranium body burden. Is that correct? I believe that’s the
case.
MR. BOX: Just a quick question here. On the releases from Y-12 I know
there was quite a bit of electromagnetic separations of the plutonium
isotopes, plutonium, neptunium, all these. Were any of those considered
along with the uranium or is that something separate or is that just not
even looked into?
DR. CHARP: The state evaluated a number of the trans-uranics and those
were ruled out for further evaluation. That was especially true at K-25,
but I faintly remember them reviewing the same information for Y-12 and
saying it doesn’t need to go beyond the initial screening that they
did. Let me quickly go over the current exposure to radiation. I’m
just going to go over the, I’ll go over both of them. One of the
issues has been the community at Scarboro, the most relevant community
to evaluate exposures to uranium releases from Y-12. Jack will get into
some of that discussion, I believe, when he goes over the conclusions
and some of the other things he’s going to discuss. The only thing
I want to say about Scarboro is that it is the closest community and it’s
been a community of great concern both with respect to is our community
safe, are the foods that are grown in Scarboro safe to eat, and how does
Scarboro compare to other parts of Oak Ridge and other parts of the country.
So, we looked at the ingestion and inhalation of uranium. In Scarboro
we looked at soil data that was collected by Florida A&M and also
validated by EPA. When you compare the Florida A&M data to the EPA
data the data are unremarkable which means they’re almost indistinguishable
from one another. And when you compare those data to data across the country
the uranium in Scarboro is indistinguishable from uranium in Chattanooga
or uranium in Kansas or other parts of the country and is very similar
to the uranium that DOE detected in their soil background characterization
studies. Based on all that we went ahead and looked at the ingestion of
foods from a private garden in Scarboro. In the garden that was grown
around monitoring station 46 in Scarboro, monitoring stations and private
gardens in Claxton and Maryville, around Norris Lake and a few other places
and to skip everything else on here all their doses that we could find
for current exposure, meaning from about 1990 on up, are well below our
screening value and it’s well below the ATSDR MRL for chemical exposures.
So, to say that the conclusion category that we selected for both past
and current exposures to uranium released from Y-12 we said are no apparent
public health hazards. I’d be glad to delve into these in a little
more in detail if you have any more questions on it. It’s all well
laid out in the health assessment and I don’t want to take up much
more time on this part.
DR. CRAIG: Looking at the current exposures, if anything would fit the
category of no public health hazard it appears that thawould. Why did
you pick the no apparent?
DR. CHARP: Well, the reason why is remember for no public health hazard
the very last Category 5 says that you have no exposure, but in Scarboro
you had some air exposure. You have some exposure going on. Now, let me
get on a different soap box and say that and I’m sure my supervisor
sitting over there in the corner will get after me on this one but it
won’t be the first time. I’ll just tell her to take a number.
ATSDR in the fifteen years that I have been with the agency has had a
problem dealing with radioactivity and radiation. All the things the agency
has done has been chemically oriented. When I came on the scene and I
said if you have something in a drum that’s sealed you have no exposure,
but if you put radium in that drum you’re being exposed and they
said well, how can that be. I said, oh, you know, gamma rays go through
the drum. You’re going to have an exposure whether or not you’re
in contact with it. You put a source outside and it’s hot enough,
radioactive enough, you can be exposed. So, there are, in essence, if
you go by the true definition of Category 5, you will never have a site
with radioactive material on the site that you have a no exposure category.
So, the minimum exposure for a radiological site is no apparent public
health concern. So, really there’s only four categories for that.
That’s one reason why it’s no apparent. Just because there’s
no quote exposure you’re being exposed to gamma radiation or something
else if it doesn’t emit gamma rays.
DR. CRAIG: Yeah, but at that level you couldn’t even determine
it from background. I mean, you couldn’t even tell it apart.
DR. CHARP: Right, but it’s still exposure. Let’s see. I don’t
know who was up.
DR. DAVIDSON: Don hasn’t spoken.
DR. CHARP: Well, you know, that’s fine. James can wait.
MR. CREASIA: I would just like to point out on these estimated doses
in the screening comparison values these are all chronic exposures. Do
you take into account any acute exposures?
DR. CHARP: We do not take into account acute exposures because these
exposures in Scarboro have been going on for, our exposure pathways covered
at least ten years. Now, we did have annual air monitoring results and
those annual doses were very low. They would not be considered a public
health hazard from a chronic exposure.
MR. CREASIA: But those are still annual doses though. Somebody may get
a big whiff one day.
DR. CHARP: Right. We had no instantaneous exposure, we had no information
on instantaneous releases. One issue is that
the air monitoring stations are quarterly measurements so you can’t
really do a fourteen day on it. Every three months the samples would be
collected. I’ve had that issue raised before at another DOE site
where they said we released ten kilograms of uranium and I said was that
in one shot or over a period of time and so, we don’t know.
MR. CREASIA: And I’m thinking back mainly to, and it gets to the
issue about the worker versus the community. The worker can be in the
shop and get a massive dose, an acute dose, go home and nothing happens
to him right away especially with the uranium, not the uranium but the
radioactive doses. But he’s still going to be categorized, when
he gets sick he’s going to be categorized in the community as a
chronically exposed person.
DR. CHARP: Yes and no. Depending on how good the bio-monitoring is within
the lab. If he thinks, he or she thinks they may have gotten exposure
they would go to the ratings and safety officer and they would do the
nose swabs and that type of stuff to see if he did get a quote body burden.
Dr. Cember has been involved in a number of those cases. I’d like
to refer to him for those types of questions.
DR. CEMBER: If we believe he’s gotten an exposure we do various
kinds of checks to see whether he has. We try to estimate what his intake
was. We have a lot of reasonably good mathematical models for doing this
based on urine analyses and fecal analyses and whole body counting and
if we think he really has a big intake immediately the nose swabs are
probably the most effective, immediately right on at the time before he
blows his nose, and so on. But we can estimate with a reasonable degree
of accuracy what his intake was based on by what they call bioassay and
this is based on urine analyses mainly and fecal analyses and whole body
counting. And whole body counting doesn’t mean we count dead bodies
like we did in Vietnam. It means that we put a big Geiger counter over
the person and see how much radiation comes from him. So, we have lots
of those data, and enough really to validate the mathematical models that
we have.
DR. CHARP: But the other issue too that I think Don is getting to is
that if the person doesn’t know they got an intake and they go home
then you don’t know whether it was acute or chronic.
MR. CREASIA: That’s right and I’m well familiar with all
the mathematical models and the safety hazards and so forth, not safety
hazard but the precautions, but I’ll tell you if you really work
in the lab you’re not going to report your exposure if that’s
what you’re doing. If that’s your research, you skip by it
because you don’t want anybody to know it.
DR. CEMBER: I agree with that and I’ve seen that many times. In
fact, I’ve tried to do some research in medical health physics and
when the physicians would do their what they call interventional radiology
and their livelihood depends on doing a cardiac catheterization while
someone is under the, being examined with x-rays by fluoroscopy, what
they do is they just, if they’re approaching the limit they will
just not wear their film badges or TLDs.
DR. CHARP: Yeah, I knew a case of somebody worked out in the Biology
Division who would, during the early work of DNA structure and P32 would
hang his film badge in the middle of the lab and it would still get over
exposed.
DR. CEMBER: But that’s not in the context that we’re talking
about here. We’re not talking about the research or the physician
who is doing this deliberately. We’re talking, I think you mean
the worker who is unknowingly exposed, the carpenter who comes in to fix
something and is exposed. Isn’t that the context in which you are
making these comments?
MR. CREASIA: It’s both. I mean, I’ve seen people working
there and they get close to the exposure but, you know, you got to get
in there and you’ve got to get that rat and you just go in there
anyway. But then when you go home you become part of the community that
you get evaluated on.
DR. DAVIDSON: But you’re also part of the work force as well.
MR. CREASIA: That’s right, but right now we’re dealing here
only with the community.
DR. DAVIDSON: But community, we’re dealing with community exposures
and what was released in the community. That’s what that dose is
based on, not what they were exposed to on the job.
MR. CREASIA: How do you differentiate that when you’re looking
at the medical records or the systematic or what have you between the
person who lives in the community and the person who works at the lab
that goes back and forth. I mean, when he goes in the community and he
dies he’s going to be recorded as a death in such and such community
A.
DR. DAVIDSON: But he’ll also be recorded as a death of a person
who worked at that place.
MR. CREASIA: But we don’t mention that in the paperwork. That’s
what I’m bringing up; it’s not mentioned; it’s skipped
over, but I agree with you, you know. I think we’re talking the
same thing really.
DR. DAVIDSON: We’re also kind of getting off subject as well.
MR. BOX: Speaking from personal experience on exposure, I was working
in the laboratory and there was a very small leak in the glove box on
plutonium work and we really didn’t know that I had been exposed
over a period of time until my badge was read and my urine was analyzed,
but it was detected. There’s very close accountability on these
things. They do read these things seriously; they do catch these things,
and they do whatever possible. I had a number of whole body counts here,
at Los Alamos, also at Idaho Falls as a check on these things. So, these
things are monitored quite well and it shows up, if not right away, like
mine was over a period of maybe a month. I had about three times the body
burden over that small period of time and yet it was detected, they did
what they could. I received the DTPA to flush the material out of my body
but it is caught pretty well even though I had worn my badge and I did,
but even if I had put my badge aside if you’re getting an exposure
your urine is going to show up.
MR. LEWIS: I have several comments. Number one, I thought this was a
pretty good document. I guess in looking at it Tony brought up an excellent
point. If you don’t plan to have Jack Hanley tied to this with the
explanation and if this gets out as one document I think you ought to
put in a caveat to pick up what he said. The other thing is so you’ll
know how to get back and as this goes out the question is even over here
on past you ought to identify the times, you know, so people have some
idea what you’re talking about. And when I got over here to the
no apparent conclusion categories my question is there are some recommendations
that are associated with this. Are there any recommendations, do you think
it would warrant putting whatever the recommendations are from the public
health assessment in that category to give people some feel of what it
is they’re going to do if this is going to be a summary document?
And the last comment I guess that I have is with health effects evaluation.
For the kids I guess related to the current, I know some work was done
over there; can you identify any health effects evaluation that may have
been done to the people that would have been associated with the past
in the evaluation of any kind of data with the people in Scarboro?
DR. CHARP: I don’t know where to start with James’ shot gun
approach to the questions. We’ll put the past was from plant start
up until about 1995. The current was from about 1990 up through 2002 or
so. The no apparent public health hazard categories and the recommendations
of the health assessment; the major recommendation was to inform the public
of what our findings were and this is part of that recommendation. But
there’s no, I don’t see any reason why we can’t put
the recommendation in with the conclusion. Sometimes the reviewers back
in Atlanta say it needs to be in its own separate paragraph or section,
but I agree with your point that it should be where you read it, so it
doesn’t hurt to repeat it more than once. As for any type of health
effects, the major health effect that you would expect to see from uranium
exposure would be, from a chemical point of view, would be kidney toxicity
issues. So, if there were any elevated rates of kidney failure or kidney
disease in Scarboro, or the surrounding areas that should be an indicator.
It’s not the only cause for kidney toxicity and kidney issues but
it is a potential indicator and other than that, from a radiological point
of view, although the kidney is the target organ for the chemical problems,
the main storage site for uranium in the body is the bone. So, you could
also look for any kind of bone disease related to the radiological properties
for uranium. The rest of your question is have they been evaluated? Not
to my knowledge.
MS. ADKINS: I just wanted to ask Dr. Cember when were those testing safety
checks put into place? Do you know when the safety checks were put into
place?
DR. CEMBER: I can’t give you a date explicitly but I was here in
1949 at ORNL and we had all of these things, the urinary monitoring and
the weekly film badges and everything else, so I don’t know how
much earlier it was but I do know that at least in 1949 we had it.
MS. ADKINS: And another question. Has any testing been done on the health
of the wives who hug the husbands when they come home from work in their
work clothes and the children who wear the shoes around the house, wear
their daddy’s shoes and those kinds of things. Did it ever go home?
Did the safety in washing clothes and, you know, ironing the clothes and
sending them back off to work in those clothes, has anybody ever looked
at that?
DR. CEMBER: Again, as I recall when I was here and I see it still goes
on in various places where I go, we wore, when we came in to work we changed
our clothing and when we left we were monitored. We did hand and foot
monitoring and portal monitoring. So, if we did take anything home it
was less than detectable, but you’re right about concern about the
families because the wives of asbestos workers, those who were exposed
to vermiculite and brought, believe, who brought the asbestos home with
them, they found the proper kinds of cancers, lung cancers, in the wives,
in some wives, and that’s a pretty unmistakable kind of association.
But we were monitored before we left. If the general public is going to
look at this it’s already pretty busy but I would suggest one or
two more columns here. You can compress some of them geometrically. What
would be the average exposure, let’s say, in the United States to
uranium generally, both chemically what would be the dose and what would
be the radiation dose and what would be the intake? And I think those
data are available. Well, the UnScear report has those data in it too.
So, I think it would probably be worthwhile clarifying for the general
public what we’re getting if you live a thousand miles away from
here, let’s say an average for the country. I think that would put
things into perspective; better than the below thirty-two times, etc.
DR. CHARP: I’ll turn it over to Jack.
DR. DAVIDSON: Thanks, Paul.
MR. HANLEY: Can everybody just take a two or three minute break until
I get set up. We’re way over time and I’m sure everyone needs
a little stretch and break.
DR. DAVIDSON: Ok. I’ll call everyone back as soon as Jack is set
up.
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