DATE: Thursday, August 28, 1997             TAG: 9708280511

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: STAFF AND WIRE REPORT 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   78 lines

NASAL THERAPY RECIPIENTS BEING ALERTED RADIATION TREATMENTS OF CONCERN TO PENTAGON

Thousands of American servicemen and civilians who were given nasal radiation treatment decades ago may be at risk for further health problems, the Defense Department said Wednesday.

The Pentagon said it is working with the Department of Veterans Affairs to identify and notify military members who received the radiation treatment. A senior defense official said only 1,600 veterans, all part of a World War II-era test of submariners done at Groton, Conn., have been identified as having received the treatment.

But the official said it is likely that thousands more military personnel, and up to 2 million civilians, also received the treatment. The official, who helped prepare a report released Wednesday on military radiation research, said the treatment was commonly used by civilian and military physicians from the 1940s until the mid-1960s to open clogged eustachian tubes.

The Veterans Affairs agency has located 73 of the Groton test subjects so far, the official said, advising them to let their personal physicians know of their past exposure. ``We really don't know'' if they or others who received the treatment have suffered any ill effects as a result, he stressed.

Submariners and pilots from the World War II era are the military personnel most likely to have undergone the treatment. They were particularly vulnerable to ear problems from exposure to rapid changes in air pressure.

The official said the treatment involved the insertion of a small radium capsule far up each nostril. The capsule would be held in position against the opening to the eustachian tube for several minutes, bathing the area with radiation, and then withdrawn.

The treatment was effective in opening the tubes, which drain fluid from the inner ear, the official said. It was uncomfortable, however, particularly so for those whose nasal passages were severely blocked; the official said that because of the discomfort, patients likely would remember the experience, regardless of how long ago the treatment occurred.

The Pentagon is not admitting that the radiation caused any health problems among servicemen, citing studies that say evidence of long-term health problems associated with the treatment are inconclusive. It now acknowledges, however, a ``significant risk'' of such linkages.

The military stopped using the treatment when pressurized aircraft cabins came into use and new medical treatments were developed, such as antibiotics and tympanic tubes.

In a February 1995 letter to a woman who was given the radium treatment by military doctors as a child in the early 1950s, the Defense Department said the practice was stopped in the 1960s in part because of ``a growing concern that the radium treatments might be associated with increased future health risk.'' It assured her the government was still studying the long-term health risks.

The Pentagon's detailed report on military radiation research involving human subjects during the Cold War said that only the nasal radiation treatments posed health questions that require medical follow-up.

Other projects among more than 2,300 radiation studies and experiments documented in the report included the use of Mennonite conscientious objectors in experimental taste tests of irradiated foods in 1956. Also, Alaska natives were given radioactive iodine-131 in an Air Force study of thyroid activity in men exposed to cold in the 1950s. The government is now negotiating compensation for some of the Alaska natives.

Stewart Farber, a public health scientist who has pressed the government for years on the nasal radiation treatments, said the Pentagon report, by dealing only with servicemen, ignores the larger population of civilians who got the treatment.

``They want to make it look like they're doing something when in reality they're not helping people,'' said Farber, who is associated with the advocacy group Center for Atomic Radiation Studies Inc., of Brookline, Mass.

Marvin Baumstein was a 27-year-old Army Air Force gunner when he was given a series of radium treatments through his nostrils in 1945 to shrink his adenoids and cure a temporary hearing loss from a B-24 bomber training flight.

It worked, Baumstein said in an interview Wednesday, but he later developed cancer of the larynx. He was a cigarette smoker but he believes the radium treatment caused his cancer.

``I would like my kids to know the Army was responsible,'' he said in the barely audible voice of a man who had half of his larynx removed. KEYWORDS: VETERAN NASAL RADIATION TREATMENT U.S. DEPARTMENT OF

DEFENSE

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