The Hawkeye Newspaper


Wait continues for IAAP watchers

Grassley enters latest round of criticism.

By RANDY MILLER
rmiller@thehawkeye.com

Apparently, the glitch holding up a recommendation to compensate former nuclear weapons workers at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant who contracted cancer is a new report stating that documentation on radiation exposure levels after 1962 has been declassified.

Office of Compensation and Analysis Support Director Larry Elliot issued a letter Monday saying that "the revised site profile describes methods for estimating external doses (of radiation) incurred after 1962 that do not rely on the use of classified data, assumptions or methods."

The Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health decided last month at a meeting in St. Louis that employees in the plant's nuclear weapons program should automatically receive $150,000 if they have been diagnosed with one of 22 cancers because it was impossible to accurately reconstruct their levels of exposure.

About 4,000 workers assembled and testfired nuclear weapons at the Middletown plant between the late1940s and the mid1970s. Many became ill after exposure to radioactive or other harmful materials.

In 2000, Congress approved compensation for the nation's former nuclear weapons workers. Immediate payment was authorized for workers in Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska, but workers at IAAP and a handful of other factories were left out.

Over the past five years, a series of bureaucratic glitches and an inability to reconstruct radiation exposure levels from existing records have resulted in fewer than 50 claims from IAAP workers or their surviving family members being paid.

The advisory board's decision at the Feb. 3 meeting should have sped up the claims by eliminating the timeconsuming effort to determine the amount of exposure each worker received.

But Elliott's report now further delays moving the recommendation up the chain of command to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt. Once Leavitt receives the advisory board's recommendation, he has 30 days to review it and make his own judgment. Congress then has another 30 days to check on Leavitt's action.

Some former workers and their families were hoping to have a final answer by April, but that is unlikely to happen.

Sen. Tom Harkin, DIowa, jumped into the fray Tuesday, writing a letter to both advisory board chairman Paul Ziemer and NIOSH Director John Howard criticizing them for the continued delays.

Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa's senior senator, chimed in Thursday, writing Howard demanding answers to a host of questions and urging an advisory board meeting be scheduled soon in Iowa "to facilitate an open and constructive discussion on this matter."

Specifically, Grassley wants to know how "this remarkable turnabout" has occurred since early February, when a Special Exposure Cohort evaluation report concluded that the "entire time period between 19491974 involved classified information, not merely 19491962."

In his letter, Grassley asks, "What changed ... from the issuance of the SEC report and the release of the revised site profile 5 weeks later? Was any data after 1962 declassified in that 5week period?"

Grassley asks for numerous documents in his letter and asks Howard to respond by March 24.

""I wish to express my frustration concerning the manner in which this additional information has been presented to the petitioners, the Advisory Board Members, and me," Grassley wrote. "If NIOSH believed in January that the methodology for estimating doses after 1962 did not rely on classified data, this information should have been made known to the petitioners and the Advisory Board members (at the Feb. 3 meeting in St. Louis)."

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