Radiation as the Cause of Lung Cancer among Uranium Miners

The Ethical Issues in Uranium Mining Research in the Navajo Nation

“…8., 1967;Archer, 1962). Subsequently, Wagoner (1965) reported a 10-fold excess in lung cancer in underground miners exposed over a longer period controlling for age, smoking, nativity, hereditary, urbanization, self-selection, diagnostic accuracy, prior mining exposure or exposure to silica. A mortality study that followed miners from the same data pool looked at 3,414 white underground miners in the region between 1950-1963.…”

Issues of causality in the history of occupational epidemiology

“…Wagoner and colleagues, drawing on radiation studies conducted by Court Brown and Doll (1957) (Wagoner et al 1965): 1) Excessive respiratory cancer 2) Dose-response relation between airborne radiation and lung cancer 3) Persistence of excess risk and dose-response after accounting for confounding variables, including time since first exposure and cigarette smoking 4) Consistency with animal studies and studies of other mining populations with similar exposures 5) Specificity for the respiratory tract 6) Lung cancer pathology among miners unlike that observed among age-smoking-residence matched control group, but similar to that of factory workers exposed to mustard gas…”

The Health Effects Of Low-Level Ionizing Radiation

“…Historic examples include carcinomas of the skin in pioneer radiologists and x-ray workers (23); leukemias in early radiologists (86); osteogenic sarcomas and carcinomas of cranial sinuses in early radium dial painters (48); and lung cancers in pitchblende and other underground hard-rock miners (99,106). With the evolution of modern radiation protection standards, the occupational risks of such cancers have been drastically re duced, but the extent to which they may still be elevated remains a subject of ongoing study.…”