Film badge records show claimant's total cumulative whole body exposure between August 1961 and July 1965 as 1.69 rem. Her total accumulated whole body dose of beta-gamma from August 3, 196! to March 21, 1962 (during the period of the spills in question) was .006 rem. The first week of February 1962 the claimant experienced irritation in both eyes. She went to a medical doctor who diagnosed the condition as the disease which has amplified the initial changes into a clinical problem of significance. The Bureau’s medical director was of the opinion that there was no relationship between the exposure and the disease because the degree of exposure was “extremely minimal.” conjuctivitis. Since pain and swelling continued the claimant went to an ophthalmologist in March 1962 and he saw a lesion on her retina which he could not diagnose in relationship to radioactive spills and he advised her to BEC’s Decision: The Bureau rejected the claim for compensation for the reason that the disability did not result from conditions proximately caused by the report the illness to the commanding officer of the laboratory. She was sent to employment. a hospital where a diagnosis of deep stromal herpes simplex keratitis was made and she was treated until September 1962. No indication that radiation exposure had a causal relationship was made at this time. Her condition steadily worsened and during a routine eye examination in October 1965 it was found that claimant had very little sight in her right eye. She filed a claim for compensation in January 1966. Medical Evidence: The claimant requested an opinion of a medical radiology specialist conceming the probable relationship between the exposure to radiation and the injury suffered. In his report the radiologist stated his opinion in terms of mere “possibility” that the herpes may have beenrelated to exposure, since, he said, he did not have a record of the claimant’s exposure. In a subsequent opinion based on the claimant’s film badge exposure the radiologist offered the following opinion in pertinent part: There is virtually no reference in the scientific literature which can elucidate underlying mechanisms in the pathogenesis of radiation-caused herpes virus infection. It has never been studied to my knowledge as a scientific problem. A film badge record of radiation dose must be considered an approximation of the average radiation dose; the radiation dose received by the part of the body monitored by the film-badge may be more or less than to other regions. From a practical point of view, the radiation dose to the eye at the time of the accident could not be determined with any precision by the amount of exposure to the film-badge. There is no reliable method, to my knowledge, of determining the level of exposure which would cause active herpes infection under the circumstances of this accident. There is little or no experimental or clinical information which bears directly on this unique combination of events, biological event—and it is the subsequent course of the pathogenesis of 132 ——ae ee ee a relevancy here, but the possibility that at the cellular level activation or reactivation of the herpes virus evidently occurred as the result of sume ca I can draw nofirm scientific or clinical conclusions.It is possible that the radiation accident triggered the herpes infection, but. this is conjectural. The underlying mechanism remains unknown. Of importance, in my mind, is not the dose-response relationship in terms of very crude quantitative estimates which may or may not have 133