/ Wed., Nov. 22, 1972 Honolulu Star- Bulletin A-15 - owe ACCORDING TO Dr. wife owiwe vee Gilbert W. aoa4 Beebe of the National Research Coun- ~ cil, a participant in the study, the incidence reached its peak sevenor eight, years after the bomb blasts. However, he said, it cannot yet be said to have re- turned to normal. Dr. Robert A. Conard, a specialist in Nuclear. Fallout radiation effects at Brookhaven Na- 7 tional Laboratory, and his colleagues have been paying periodic visits to! landers. Rongelapatoll is a necklace of 61 islets in the Marshall Islands. ne The most obvious effect of the expo- _ NEW YORK—Thefirst known death from a disorder typical of radiation ex- posure has occurred among those sub- jected to heavy fallout from nuclear weaponstests. The victim was a 19-year-old Ronge- . lap islander named Lekoj Anjain, who ~ died last Wednesdayof leukemia at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., after an intensive effort to ¢ stem rapid progress of the disease with * chemicals. Anjain was one of 64 inhabitants of opment of thyroid nodules. They have been removed surgically and often found to be of a harmless type. On the last visit, in September, Lekoj Anjain was found to have a’ somewhat depressed count of white blood corpuscles. > sure, Conard said, has been the devel- By Walter Sullivan SUCH ‘“CLOSE-IN”’ fallout is partieularly dangerous becauseit is still rich in material that decays rapidly and$e- comes harmless within a few hours. lower count and he was flown to Brook- ~ The total exposure of the islanders was haven, where the diagnosis was myelo- ° believed to have been 175 rads (a dosgenous leukemia. A hospital plane took age unit) which, Conrad added, had him to Bethesda where the most adnot been expected to produce a high leukemia incidence. vanced chemical therapy was adminisIn addition to those at Rongelap and tered. aboard the Lucky Dragon, 18 on AilHe shared a room, at the clinical A FOLLOW-UPtest showed an even Rongelap atoll subjected in 1954 to a “snowfall” of fresh, heavy fallout from center of the National Institutes of a hydrogen bomb explosion over Bikini Health, with Stewart Alsop, the colatoll, 100 miles to the west. umnist, who was in with lobar pneuOVER THE YEARS the Pacific is-. monia. Alsop’s Oct. 30 column in Newslanders have continued to display ap- - week magazine was on ‘‘Lekoj and the Unusable Weapon.” parent effects of their exposure. Two of them, for example, were operated on CONARD POINTED OUT thatit is, in Cleveland recently to remove thyroid nodules, which have been a typical _. never possible to fix the blamefor the . contracted leukemia, which is known’ ever, he said the chances were “fairly good” that in this case it was due to manifestation. But until now none had. to be, in some cases, a long-delayed consequence of radiation exposure. It is estimated that, of some 284,000 survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 100 have died of leukemia who would not. have done sn, had they not been ex- nosed to radiation from the bombs. Since 1950 the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission—a Japanese-American less than 100,000 of these people. From their histories the total leukemia | deaths have been estimated at 330, compared to 230 to be expected ina normal population of equal size. oe check on the health of the Rongelap is- ~ Victim? agency—has been following somewhat ~ ingne island were also exposed, but the doses were estimated at only about 69 rads. Any dose in excess of 600 radsis considered almost invariably fatal. (C) N.Y. Tinses Service o onset of a disease like leukemia. How- fallout exposure. The explosion that showered fallout on Rongelap was the same that rained such material on the Japanese fishing’ vessel, Lucky Dragon. However, ac-.. cording to Conard, none of the 23 men on board have died of radiation-related ~ disease. The device fired over Bikini ~ was reportedly the first deliverable hy. drogen bomb. + The fallout began on Rongelap some = four or five hours after the explosion: and continued for 10 or 12 hours. The primary exposure was from particles emitting gamma rays so penetrating that the location of a person, indoors or outdoors, probably madelittle differ- _ ence in his exposure, Conard said. ba