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September 7th, 2007 Dr. Chris Busby was appointed as Representative to the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association on research, and will be seeking to procure documents and research questionnaires which have been archived by the University of Dundee following the research carried out upon the questionnaire data in 1999 by Sue Rabbitt-Roff.
September 1st, 2007 We have just finished our latest piece of epidemiology, a case-control survey study of the children and grandchildren of members of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA). These are the men who were involved in the atmospheric Atomic tests which were carried out in Australia and Malden and Christmas Islands in the Pacific (1952-1967). We looked at their children and also their grandchildren to see if there were any heritable effects from the radiation exposures they received. There were. The veterans' children had more than nine times the congenital conditions (heart defects, Downs Syndrome, missing fingers, teeth, skeletal disorders etc) than the control children and astonishingly, the grandchildren had almost the same excess of congenital disease. These levels were highly statistically significant (p < 0.00003) and remained when we compared the children with national data from the EUROCAT congenital anomaly database so it wasn't just that the control children were healthy. In addition, the veterans wives suffered almost three times the miscarriage rate and there were almost three times the numbers of stillbirths. Cancer levels in the children were raised slightly (25% relative to national expected values) but the result was not statistically significant. These results follow earlier work on the issue by Sue Rabbitt Roff (1999) and John Urquhart (1992). We conclude that the high levels of ill health in the grandchildren are evidence of genomic instability caused by exposure of the fathers to internal contaminants like uranium and plutonium. Many of the vets were just stationed at the sites and did not experience a detonation: however the levels of contamination and the inhalation of radioactive dust will have contaminated their bodies. Read the preliminary report here. British Nuclear Test Veterans This story was published in The Sunday Mirror 16/9/07 500 YEAR NUKE CURSE - News - Sunday Mirror
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