Frank's radium sinus treatment
Patrick Neve
Along with my earaches and asthma, I had sinus trouble. There was some
'new tratment' for this ailment being discussed in the neighborhood. It
involved stuffing radium into your sinus cavities. (Have you ever head of
this?) My parents took me to yet another Italian doctor, and, although I
didn't know what they were going to do to me, it didn't sound like it was
going to be too much fun. The doctor had a long wire thing-maybe a foot
or more, and on the end was a pellet of radium. He stuffed it up my nose
and into my sinus cavities on both sides. (I should probably check to see
if my handkerchief is glowing in the dark.)
From: The Baltimore City Paper
http://www.citypaper.com/1999-08-25/mobs.html
August 25 - August 31, 1999
Nose Out
Tight Lid Kept on Study Linking Nasal-Radiation Treatment to Illness
By Michael Sachdev
In June 1997 the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health awarded Hsin-Chieh
Yeh a Ph.D. for her dissertation, "Health Effects After Childhood
Nasopharyngeal Radium Irradiation." The paper explains the effects of
nasal-radiation treatments, pioneered by Hopkins doctors, that were widely
performed on children in the 20 years following World War II to treat
chronic ear and sinus infections. Yeh's conclusion: People who received
the treatment are 30.9 times more likely to get benign and malignant brain
tumors, 14.4 times more likely to grow salivary-gland tumors, and 4.2
times more likely to suffer thyroid cancer than people who did not.
Yeh's thesis offers perhaps the fullest picture yet of the little-studied
effects of nasopharyngeal radium irradiation (NRI), a treatment developed
and popularized by Hopkins and performed on hundreds of thousands of
children until it was abandoned in the 1960s. But two years after its
approval, access to the thesis remains severely restricted.
Officials at Hopkins' Department of Epidemiology say they cannot release
copies of Yeh's thesis without her permission because it awaits
publication in a scientific journal later this year. Kathy Moore,
spokesperson for Hopkins' School of Public Health, say Yeh is authorizing
releases on a case-by-case basis, but Yeh did not return a reporter's
calls seeking access to her study. An aide to Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-Conn.)
says his boss has to date been unable to obtain the report, and when City
Paper tried to order the paper from Bell and Howell Information and
Learning, a Michigan-based dissertation-distribution service, a sales
representative said it was on restricted status. According to Stewart
Farber, a Rhode Island public-health scientist who has been researching
the nasal-radium issue since the early 1980s, Bell and Howell has even
tried to recall copies already in circulation.
Farber says he got a copy of Yeh's work from the company in September
1998. But days after the Wall Street Journal published and article on the
study this past July 26, Farber says, Bell and Howell contacted him and
asked that he return his copy. (He refused, and he provided City Paper
with a copy.)
Farber's Radium Experiment Assessment Project advocates for hundreds of
people who had NRI as children and now blame it for ailments ranging from
lost teeth and impotence to thyroid tumors and cancer ("Fair Treatment,"
CP, 11/5/97). Hopkins has long contended there is no conclusive evidence
of increased health risks associated with nasal-radium treatment, and has
resisted widespread notification of former treatment recipients on the
grounds that it would cause unnecessary panic. To Farber, the school's
failure to distribute Yeh's dissertation is an attempt to protect itself
from blame. Yeh "is obviously under tremendous pressure by the powers that
be to hide her findings," he says.
But Hopkins officials deny any motivation other than protecting Yeh's work
before it is formally published. "Her findings are in no way being covered
up," Moore says.
NRI grew out of work by Hopkins' Dr. Samuel Crowe, who discovered in the
1920s that irradiation could shrink swollen lymphoid tissue, curing
everything from nasal infections to sore throats. Over the next 20 years,
that discovery developed into the treatment, which involved inserting
radium-tipped wands into patients' nostrils.
The wands were magic, curing everything from simple sinus infections to
deafness caused by recurring ear, nose, and throat infections and
inflammation. The federal Center for Disease Control estimates that
between 500,000 and 2.5 million people, mostly children, received NRI. But
in the 1960s, as awareness grew of the correlation between radiation
exposure and cancer, radium treatments became less and less popular, and
were finally used only to treat life-threatening ailments.
Until the completion of Yeh's work, only two studies on NRI had been
completed, with conflicting results. A 1982 study by Hopkins' Dr. Dale
Sandler found that NRI patients are 5.3 times more likely to develop brain
tumors than people who did not receive nasal radiation. Sandler also
reported a higher incidence of brain cancer among NRI patients. But in a
1989 study, Dutch researcher Dr. Peter Verduijn found no relationship
between high cancer rates and NRI.
Farber says Hopkins has been "eager to quote Verduijn's 1989 findings" in
assessing NRI risks, but he says the study is irrelevant to Hopkins' case
because "the [radium] dose delivered to children in the Netherlands was
3.5 times lower than the average radium dose delivered by Johns Hopkins"
at a Hagerstown clinic it ran from 1943 to 1960. Farber also notes that
Verduijn reanalyzed his data in 1996, checking with the same patients he
studied for the '89 report, and found a health risk. "The exposed group
had twice as many verified malignant tumors as the nonexposed group," the
Dutch researcher wrote in the later report. "A striking difference was
found in the occurrence of head and neck tumors."
Farber calls Yeh's work the most comprehensive yet on NRI. "It's a smoking
gun," he says.
Karen Infeld, a spokesperson for the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions,
says that despite Yeh's findings, the institution has not revised its
earlier decision against blanket notification of people treated with NRI.
"We can't make a judgment unless [Yeh's thesis] is [published]," she says.
"Once the results are officially presented, we'll be making a decision
about them."
The thesis has also attracted attention on Capitol Hill. George Gager, an
aide for Rep. Gejdenson, says he is drafting a letter to Yeh on his boss'
behalf. "The letter is asking for a copy of the study to be released to
Congressman Gejdenson," Gager says. "This is a potential health hazard
that could affect 2.5 million Americans."
Gager says he received NRI treatments for childhood nasal and ear
infections from 1949 to 1963 while growing up near a Navy submarine base
in Connecticut. "I probably had more treatments than anyone else around,"
he says. "I haven't had a problem with cancer, but I did have a problem
with my thyroid and pituitary. It damn near ruined my life."
ZOOGZ RIFT
I think affz readers should try it--you know, just to check it out and
see if it's true--I don't mean anything sinister about it or
anything...
Gary
hyper extend. I've seen photos of bro Bob and sis Candy and neither
of them has that kinda schnozz.
Charles Ulrich
faultl...@yahoo.com (Gary) wrote:
> I think it's fairly obvious that this treatment caused FZ's nose to
> hyper extend.
Surely that was from Uncle Meat's nasal mist.