THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Saturday, April 1, 1995                TAG: 9504010262
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: NEWSDAY 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                         LENGTH: Short :   45 lines

VA TO STUDY RADIUM'S LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON VETS 700 SUBMARINERS WERE TREATED FOR MIDDLE-EAR AILMENTS.

The Department of Veterans Affairs will seek medical records on 700 submariners who served in the 1940s and 1950s to see how many received a controversial radium treatment for middle ear problems, a spokesman said Thursday.

The request, to be sent to a military records archive in St. Louis within the next several weeks, is a preliminary step toward a possible study on the long-term health effects of the radiation procedure, the VA's Terry Jemison said.

Most of the names were drawn from submarine duty rosters and enrollment files from the Navy's submarine training school, Jemison said.

The military used the nasal radium treatments on thousands of submariners and pilots from the 1940s to the 1960s. Radium-tipped rods were inserted through the nose to ``burn out'' or shrink tissue at the opening of the eustachian tubes that lead to the middle ear. The intent was to prevent ear pain and balance problems in trainees during submarine escape tests or in air crews during atmospheric pressure changes in flight.

Stewart Farber, a Rhode Island health physicist who described the radium treatments to Newsday last year, said research studies show that at least 7,613 military personnel underwent the procedure in 1944 and 1945 alone - 732 submariners and 6,881 Army Air Force trainees. Farber and some veterans groups have been pressing for follow-up on those treated to see whether they have had a higher incidence of head and neck cancers or thyroid problems than the general population.

The nasal radium treatments also were widely used in children at the time to shrink chronically swollen adenoids.One 1982 study of 904 children treated with radium between 1943 and 1960 did find that four had died of malignant head and neck tumors while no such tumors were found in a comparable untreated group of children.

KEYWORDS: STUDY SUBMARINE RADIUM by CNB