Episode 4: At What Cost?

This episode further discusses the human cost of a risky radium treatment that was used widely across the country. 

Transcript

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In the last episode of Radium and Roses, we heard about Johns Hopkins efforts to cover up the effects of the nasal radium treatment that we learned my grandfather had received us a child. We also heard about the large number of submariners and U. S military members who also received the treatment. In this episode, you'll hear more about the history of the use of the treatment on submariners and U. S military members. Along with more of the history of what happened in the mid 19 nineties, a Stewart Farber worked tirelessly to bring attention to this issue. To begin this episode, I want to return to the March 12th 1996 testimony that Stewart Farber gave before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, senator of Alaska, says in his opening statement that this was the third in a series of hearings undertaken by the committee to examine the progress that the government had made to identify and catalog the many radiation experiments carried out in our nation involving human subjects, and to establish an effective set of policies and procedures to protect our citizens from dangerous and unethical research practices. He goes on to say that last October in 1995 the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments were Acre presented their report to the administration to remind you this is the report that considered the 1948 study at Johns Hopkins to be therapeutic experimentation. Senator Stevens mentions the 18 recommendations that Acre made in their report, and he says that today or at that 1996 hearing, their intention was to discover what progress had been made in terms of implementing acres recommendations. So Stuart Farber's testimony, of course, tells the story of how he had to put continued pressure on Acre to even mention the issue of nasal radium irradiation. And then, of course, he was not satisfied with how they actually addressed the issue, because the committee declined to recommend medical notice and follow up for those who had been treated with an R I. That encompasses the three main points of Stewart farmers. 1996 testimony one says that anymore. I Human radiation experiments would never have been addressed by Acre if it had not been forced to do so by scientists and citizens outside of the government, such as himself to the acre risk analysis for Enter I is Flawed. Three acres findings and recommendations for no notice, no follow up related to an Arai are without merit scientifically, medically and ethically. Do two acres error. Lifetime risk of head and neck cancers has been underestimated by a factor of 1.9 in

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the 1996 testimony. Stewart says that in late 1993 following Dele revelations about the breadth of the human radiation experiments and in particular the number of people potentially affected by nasal radium irradiation, he began even further efforts to address the issue. In January of 1994 he was able to interest Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut in the nasal radium irradiation of Navy sub Mariners in Connecticut by the Naval Medical Research Lab. Farber says that in January of 1994 Lieberman raised the nasal radium issue at a hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on human radiation experiments. Lieberman was able Teoh receive some general commitments from the V A that it would investigate the issue and possibly notify exposed veterans about potential health problems associated with the treatments. But up until that point in 1996 the Va. Had failed to provide any notice to any veterans, whether exposed experimentally or subsequently as standard medical practice from 1946 into the 19 sixties. In July of 1994 Farber authored a news release and review on behalf of a veteran group called the Submarine Survivors Group. UM, the review regarded the initial use of an Orion sub Mariners in Groton, Connecticut, by the Navy and Army Air Force on aviators across bases across the U. S. And in Europe, a total of about 7613 individuals. This review provided documentation that enter i was initially a human radiation experiment by the admission of Navy and Army antes involved in the experimental use of Enter I. Farmer says the 1994 press release for the Some Submarine Survivors Group was faxed to the acre committee and that it included quotes from a 1946 medical journal, which described that of 6149. Maybe training is evaluated in the initial study at the Navy's Medical Research Laboratory in New London, Connecticut. During 1945 to 1946 732 experimental navy subjects received a course of 4 10 minute radiations on average, estimated with a range of 2 to 8 radiations in each nostril of radium. Irradiation

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Farmer says that acre ignored the enter. I issue up until 1995. Here he is, speaking on the issue in April of 2020

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and Vice Chair Committee. You know, grudgingly incredibly grudgingly cook up the any consideration of the nasal radium, which, when they did you know that. But it was actually the one experiment that they wrote into their report, but in a way that was incredibly deceitful. They broke it up, put it in different sections of their report, made it almost impossible to realize. What in the world are they talking about because they know it was a delivery attempt to minimize it, not really address it. As a direct result of Stewart's efforts, Senator Lieberman hold the U. S. Senate hearing on the issue titled Assessing the Effects of Nasal Radium Treatments. This hearing was held before the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Regulation of the Committee on Environment and Public Works of the U. S. Senate on August 29th of 1994. Stewart testified at the hearing as a radiation risk assessment specialist

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in April of 2020 Stewart sent me a copy of this 1994 testimony. Now I want to turn for a few minutes. So that 1994 testimony, because it gives us a good sense of why Stewart was pursuing this issue at the time, he says. I am trained as a public health and environmental scientists, having received an M S in public health air pollution control from the University of Massachusetts School of Public Health 1973 following several years of professional work experience as an R and D organic chemist, I received an A B in chemistry from Brown University in 1967 and subsequently and completed graduate medical course work in genetics, biostatistics and biochemistry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Stewart says he became aware of honor. I threw two of his co workers who had received Enter I From a new London, Connecticut based private physician. He says that his friend Mike received the treatment in 1966 as a recreational scuba diver while working for General Dynamics as a test engineer. His friend was treated by a doctor, Henry L. Haines, a former Navy captain who start had found their his literature surge, who had developed the procedure for the U. S Naval Medical Research Laboratory submarine program during World War Two. As a young Navy captain, Stuart Farber says that his friend was referred to the private TNT practice of Dr Haynes because he had used the radium irradiation treatment for people who were having trouble equalizing pressure under water. The second coworker of Stewart Farber's received radium treatments as a child growing up in New London during the 19 fifties, also from Dr Hans for adenoid, or middle ear problems, common a young Children for which radium, nasal or radiation was being commonly used by an estimated 1000 to 2000 physicians across the U. S. At the time. In the 1994 testimony, Stewart Farmer says that he surveyed the literature and that it was quickly evident to him in a reading of some of the open medical literature that this procedure became the treatment of choice from 1945 onward for the US Navy. In that 1994 testimony, Farber says that it's possible to estimate ah cohort numbering approximately 10,000 ex Navy sub Mariners, received the treatment as a consequence of their initial training in Groton, Connecticut. He goes on to say that all it radiations were administered with a commercially available standardised moon l metal, a radiator with a 50 milligram radium equivalent and following the irradiation protocol developed by Dr Haynes and his Navy Medical Associates. Now there's a complex history here that does connect the use of the treatment on sub Mariners to the 1948 study at Johns Hopkins. But we'll get into that in next week's episode to return to the 1996 testimony, Stewart describes how he had to put pressure on eager to address the entire Iot issue. He also says that their analysis of the risk of an hour I was flawed and that acres recommendation for no notice, no follow up for an hour I treated individuals was without merit. In both the 1994 in 1996 testimony, Stewart Farber refers to the one and Onley follow up study at that point in time studying the after effects of the treatment. It was a PhD thesis completed by a Dr Dale Sandler at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. It's called the Health Consequences of Nace Affair Angel radium exposure the main result that there's an overall, statistically significant increase and benign and malignant tumors of the head and neck among the irradiated patients compared to the non irradiated. That cohort that Sandler studied in 1979 into 1980 is the same cohort that Yea studied in her 1997 dissertation. So by the 19 eighties, Johns Hopkins knew about the effects of the treatment. By 1997 Hopkins definitely knew about the effects of the treatment. By 2001 Hopkins was trying to minimize the risk associated with the treatment. By 2005 Stewart Farber had retired from the issue to use his words in frustration and disgust. And by June of 2019 I lost my grandfather. On June 19th 2019 nearly a year exactly after his diagnosis, Ronald Robert Rowe Sr died of the brain cancer that he developed after being exposed to radium as a child through an experimental treatment, men to cure him of his allergies or of hearing loss. At the beginning of the week, Lin called my mom to tell her that the nurse had said it would be probably 24 to 48. Hours before he passed, my mom asked me once again if I would go with her on short notice to North Carolina. My mom and I were there, along with my uncle's, Ron and Steve. On the 19th my grandfather's sister, Carol, decided that she would drive down from Maryland to be their asses. Well, I never experienced anything quite like it, passing the time, waiting for someone to die. Late that night, Carol and her husband finally arrived for Maryland. I had gone into the guest room to lay down and try and get some sleep. I don't know what time it was when my mom came to wake me up to tell me that he had passed. It turns out that Carol had been there visiting with him for less than 10 minutes before he finally took his last breath. It was strange, as if he was waiting for her. Now. I had seen a dead body before, but made up at the funeral parlor. Never like that, never a figure that loomed so large in my life made so small, and it is old Bay pajamas that we had likely gifted him for Christmas. I think it was after midnight when the funeral home finally took him away. I'd see him one last time at the funeral home before he was cremated at that point, and at this point my family is pretty spread out. So it seemed impossible for our family to gather in North Carolina the week that he died. We decided on a date in August for his Memorial weekend, and that weekend we all gathered in a historic house in downtown Waynesville, North Carolina. We spread his ashes on the mountain, where he lived with Lin for so many years. We spread them by the creek, where he had smoked many a pipe and drank many a whiskey by the fire, the creek where my cousins and I played as Children, where we would look for Ruby's because our grandfather told us that we could find them there, where I had stacked rocks two days after he died, a testament to all that I would build in my grandfather's memory. Now all the we've discovered about an Arai about the use of the treatment on US military members and the use of the treatment on Children. Knowing that he had received this treatment didn't change the ultimate outcome. But had he been made aware earlier on about the risks that he faced as someone who had received this treatment, he would have had earlier screenings of his head and neck. Had the CDC year Johns Hopkins or someone announced in, say, 2001 that people who received honor I were at risk for cancer? Maybe a doctor would have found my grandfather's brain tumor before it was the size of 11 when it was still operable. And thing that I keep coming back to is that this is no longer a story about my grandfather. This is a story about the risk that 500,002 million people are unaware that they're facing. So this story doesn't end with my grandfather's death. The story continues today in 2020 as my mom and I continue to research about the history of the treatment and the doctors who pioneered it and used it on so many young people, completely ignoring the potential risks. Doctors who ultimately decades later are protected by the reputation of an institution complicity in covering up the effects of the treatment. Tune in to Episode five To hear more about this history, which we found, the deeper you dig into it, the more disturbing it becomes.

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Theme music for this episode is the song Mama Said by Cat Clyde.