Robert G. Loeffler, M.D. 9521 Woodington Drive Potomac, MD 20854 July 23, 1980 ACYLO Mr. Richard D. Copaken Covington & Burling 888 Sixteenth Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20006 Dear Richard, . I have had the opportumity to review the most recent commmication fron Wallace 0. Green, Deputy Under Secretary, Territorial and International Affairs, to President Amata Kabua, wherein certain "clarifications" are detailed by Mr. Bruce W. Wachholz, germane to the proposed agreement of March 27, 1980 for the medical survey of the inhabitants of Likiep Atoll. I find these clarifications most welcome since they specify, to a degree, the proposed "biochemical screening profile". Before commenting specifically on them, I must appraise you of same general considerations in light of our April 23, 1980 meeting with representattives of the Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and the Department of Interior. I also found this meeting helpful and informative, specifically discussions with Dr. Pratt, whose extensive medical experience and data gathering at the Marshall Islands clearly detailed major foreseeable difficulties with the proposed studies by the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy. It is blatantly clear that interpretation of biochemical analyses re- quires a reference standard of comparison normal values. Simply put, ~~” such a normal standard currently does not exist for the Marshallese population at large. Dr. Pratt informed us that several prior attempts of gathering biochemical and hematological data from populations in the Marshall Islands, other than Rongelap and Utirik, to be used as normal standard reference, could not be meaningfully interpreted for two reasons: 1) The data obtained varied considerably from established norms, and 2) ~ the quantity of data collected was not large enough to be statistically significant. The March 27 proposal, as you know, plans on studying Likiep Atoll and one other atoll, as a "comparison population". I find it difficult to A