Mystery Illnesses

In a series of articles published on September 29, 1998, The Tennessean reported the medical sufferings of some four hundred people living in the vicinity of federal nuclear weapons facilities in eleven states, recording an array of unexplained and sometimes bizarre ailments. The reporters avoided making any assertions about the cause of these illnesses, and did not label what they had uncovered an epidemic. Instead, they emphasized the sufferings, struggles, and puzzlement of the victims as well as the government’s unwillingness to provide medical help or even to commission studies to find out what was wrong, and whether the weapons facilities played any role in the illnesses.

Critics attacked at once. The Wall Street Journal accused the newspaper of fomenting hysteria, costing “millions of dollars in wasted scientific studies,” enriching trial lawyers through “billions of dollars in lawsuits,” and even threatening the nation’s nuclear deterrent. But the articles moved many to ask the very questions the Journal wanted to squelch. In the wake of the series, Senator Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called for a congressional investigation of the illnesses, and the Department of Energy reversed its longtime policy, announcing that the government would help obtain medical assistance, even without direct proof of a “plausible connection.”

 

A mysterious pattern of illnesses — from immune systems gone haywire to brain malfunctions doctors can’t explain — is emerging around this nation’s nuclear weapons plants and research facilities. The ill live in places unlike others, where poison bomb ingredients wafted into the air, sank into the soil and leaked in the water for half a century.

No one has ever taken a comprehensive look at their health — not the federal government that owns the sites, the public health agencies charged with protecting their well-being, nor the politicians who represent them in the nation’s capital. Scientists have been concerned for decades about radiation from nuclear production and its link to cancer. But the illnesses emerging now are something different.

In 1997, The Tennessean found scores of people suffering a pattern of unexplained illnesses around the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation in East Tennessee. This year, the newspaper found hundreds of people with similar illnesses around 12 other nuclear weapons sites nationwide.

“It’s like the devil has been let loose in my body,” says Freddie Fulmer, 41, a former worker at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River nuclear site near Aiken, S.C. Fulmer, declared disabled in 1995, suffers from a degenerative joint and spine disease, kidney ailments, and a rare disorder that causes his immune system to attack, rather than protect, his internal organs.

“Every single morning my whole body hurts so badly I can barely get out of bed to go stand under a hot shower until I can move around using my cane,” Fulmer says. “And then there’s the weird stuff, like once I had a fever for seven months straight. But, like everything else, the doctors couldn’t tell my why or help me.”

 

Fulmer Is Not Alone

He is one of 410 people in 11 states interviewed by The Tennessean who are experiencing a pattern of unexplained immune, respiratory and neurological problems attacking their bodies and minds. The newspaper found ill residents and workers in Tennessee, Colorado, South Carolina, New Mexico, Idaho, New York, California, Ohio, Kentucky, Texas, and Washington state. Activists believe many more people are suffering from the illnesses at these and other weapons sites across the nation.

The illnesses, including tremors, memory loss, debilitating fatigue, and an array of breathing, muscular, and reproductive problems, mirror those found in Oak Ridge.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s premier disease tracking agency, is investigating the Oak Ridge illnesses at the state’s request. The CDC began its probe in the neighborhood closest to the reservation and so far has found severe respiratory problems in a third of the children there. The probe continues. In a separate inquiry, DOE has found higher than expected levels of bomb-grade uranium in the Scarboro community.

 

They Want Answers

Top scientists say the newspaper’s finding are disturbing.

“Four hundred people is a lot of people,” says George W. Lucier, director of the environmental toxicology program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health. “It’s not just two or three. It is something widespread. . . . At least the wheels should be set in motion in which a team of physicians can go in and look at things more systematically.”

Many of the ill believe their ailments stem from exposure to dangerous substances that were released into the environment around the nuclear weapons sites. They have no evidence. Their belief stems from what they see happening to themselves and others. Their stories are anecdotal, not scientific.

And that lies at the heart of their struggle.

The government has traditionally required proof of harm before medical help is offered. So either the ill must prove toxic exposure has hurt them — which scientists say they have little chance of doing — or hope the nation will take action now on anecdotal evidence and try to help them. Leading scientists differ on that issue.

“I empathize with people who are sick. They want answers,” says John Till, president of the scientific research firm Risk Assessment Corp. in Neeses, S.C., which conducts studies for DOE. “But you still have to go back and see if any releases could have caused health problems.”

Top DOE officials say that is exactly the tack the department has chosen.

“Where there’s a plausible connection we’ll follow up on it,” says Peter Brush, an attorney who, as acting assistant secretary for environment, safety and health, is the department’s top health official. Through ongoing studies, “we’re looking for some plausible connection between the work that went on at these sites and health consequences for workers or neighbors.”

But these studies have not asked about these ill people — instead they’ve focused on such things as the levels of poison in ants in Idaho and turtles in Tennessee.

CDC Deputy Director Dr. Claire Broome says “Establishing an association between exposures to environmental hazards and chronic diseases is a complex area of scientific investigation.” But it is necessary to continue attempts “to detect and investigate health problems that may be associated with hazardous exposures. . . .”

Other top scientists say it is time to consider helping the sick. “It’s really inappropriate for us to simply use science as an out, and say ‘We just don’t understand this, we’ll come back when we do,’” says Dr. Bernard D. Goldstein, a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. “We have to at least be responsive to people now.”

Dr. Howard Frumkin, chairman of environmental and occupational health at Atlanta’s Emory University, who has seen some of the ill, agrees: “The more I hear about communities with self-identified health problems, the more the anecdotal evidence satisfies me. One could argue it’s neglectful of the government not to look at whether harm has been done to these people. These aren’t abstract health worries.”

 

A Responsibility to Care

Many of the ill are longtime workers at complexes opened during World War II or the Cold War to produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons for the nation’s defense.

“We were saving America,” says Ray Guyer, 60, who worked at the Rocky Flats complex near Denver more than 30 years. Doctors found radioactive plutonium in a bone spur from his knee, but they can’t explain his dizziness, numbness, rashes, or other health problems.

“We were young and believed in what we were doing,” he adds, his voice cracking with emotion. “Now we just need some help.”

Political leaders, like scientists, have differing views about what should be done, or when. U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., whose state is home to a major nuclear weapons site, says: “I’ve been a strong proponent of assuring people injured by their government receive medical advice and assistance. I will encourage the Department of Energy to carefully review these findings and determine how best to act.”

U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., the only physician in the U.S. Senate, says, “It’s important that we find out if there is any common denominator in the illnesses reported by some area residents. The health complaints gathered from people living in communities near nuclear plants certainly raise questions. Before drawing any conclusions, however, we must be careful to rely on scientific evidence.”

Yet no one knows what can happen to the human body if it is exposed to low levels of many different toxic agents over time. That, experts say, is the most likely kind of exposure these people could have.

They live in places contaminated by an array of exotic metals and chemicals, a spectrum of radioactive substances, and common toxic agents used in wholly uncommon quantities. Among these: radioactive elements like plutonium and cesium; chemical compounds, such as the solvent carbon tetrachloride and cancer-causing PCBs; toxic metals, such as lead, mercury, and arsenic.

Government officials acknowledge the nuclear development sites are highly contaminated and have launched billion-dollar cleanup plans. But, they say, the contamination rarely reached workers or residents in amounts high enough to harm them.

 

Hard to Show Cause and Effect

A few of the ill said their health problems began three or four decades ago. Most said symptoms began in the 1980s and 1990s.

Why would people be getting sick now, years after Cold War weapons productions ceased? And why would only some be getting sick? Certainly, most people around these sites remain healthy.

“Those are two hard questions because we don’t know what controls” the start of disease, says David Ozonoff, chairman of Boston University’s Department of Environmental Health and widely considered a top expert in tracking disease and its causes. “The easy part is conceiving that it happens.”

“Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. And not everyone who gets sneezed on gets a cold.”

Few of the doctors to the ill will discuss their health problems — and those who will are at a loss to explain the cause.

“I have patients who live around Rocky Flats,” says Dr. Joseph Montante, a Boulder, Colo., physician. “They have chronic cough, immune system suppression, joint pain. But that’s an area where it’s really hard to show cause and effect.”

Dr. W.A. Shrader, a specialist in environmental medicine in Santa Fe, N.M., near the nation’s first nuclear bomb lab, says, “A lot of these patients have these bizarre symptoms. . . . I feel the patients aren’t getting the information they need to get to the specialists to get the help they need.”

Today, the ill have neither a national network nor a united voice to find out what is going so terribly wrong with their health.

“I rarely leave the house, except for going to the doctor or the hospital — that’s a pretty lonely life,” says Gay Brown, 57, who grew up near the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation. She was a special education teacher before becoming totally disabled in 1977 by illnesses she describes as “weird things going on in my blood and immune system. My bones and muscles hurt so bad at times, I can’t stand to be touched. I’ve got awful skin rashes that won’t go away. There’s the thyroid problems, memory loss, blackouts. . . . Oh, just about everything is breaking down, inside and out.”

In many cases, the ill were not aware scores of others in their own communities are suffering like them.

As news of the health problems around the nuclear complexes inches its way to the nation’s top medical and scientific communities, more and more experts have begun to call for immediate action.

“It is criminal — there is no doubt these people are sick and need help,” says Dr. Victor Sidel, a former president of the American Public Health Association and distinguished professor of social medicine at New York City’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine at the Montefiore Medical Center.

Sidel, who is also a co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning activist organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, adds: “The government has both an ethical and moral responsibility to come forward and help them as a public health policy, whether specific links between the illnesses and the weapons centers can ever be established.”

Nuclear engineer Arjun Makhijani, president of the nonprofit Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, is equally direct: “These nuclear weapons establishments may have harmed the very people that nuclear weapons are supposed to protect. Exposure to these poisons has posed severe health problems for thousands of people living in and around weapons production and testing sites.

“It is time for the U.S. government to take that responsibility, to take these illnesses realistically and to help the sick people.”

Emory’s Frumkin says these people are different: “They were exposed to excess risk on behalf of the country. If the government did something that might have harmed them, it owes a special debt to these people.”

Fulmer, from his Aiken home in the shadows of the Savannah River site’s now-still reactors, reflects on what could be. “I’d love to be well,” he says finally. “I’d love for the government to look into all these problems and maybe find a way to figure out what’s going wrong — and to help us, if anyone can.”