Ray: Well, I refer you again to the purpose of the study. the survey and the study. The purpose of It is and has been to determine whether or not it is reasonable for people to continue to live in these locations, or whether there are things there that would influence us to make recommendations, either about changing the diet, changing the lifestyle, changing the place of residence or otherwise. Those things we can do something about if we know, if we were to find in this study that there is some practice which is leading to unnecessary exposures to radiation. We can then make a suggestion to the people concerned as to how they can moderate that as would be done, for example, when we find that the foods _from the northern islands of Rongelap are significantly more contaminated than those in the southern islands. The suggestion there would be that people not take a substantial part of their diet from the northern islands but use, to the extent that they use locally, locally grown foods, the foods that come from the southern islands. can do something about. I repeat. That's something we By giving advice and recommendations we cannot today do something about what happened ten years ago. And the purpose of this, although there are other studies that look at ten years ago or twenty years ago, this is not that study but what we are reporting upon is a study as to what conditions are there now, in order that people can make decisions about their own lives. Cowan: That does not answer my question. My question is how can you make recommendations for the future without taking into consideration what they already ingested, people already ingested? Ray: The recommendations that we make have to do with whether or not there will be unnecessary future exposures, exposures or doses that could be avoided. We have also separate from this study, we have also knowledge of the doses and exposures that people have had. We have knowledge, by virtue of the whole body counting program, of how much radioactive material people have in their bodies. We have had those studies going on for sometime. Those are not what we are reporting here. those, we have extensive reports on those. for a very specific purpose. If you would like to read about This is talking about a survey Providing for future planning of people of the northern Marshalls. 25