This Article  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Glyn C. Caldwell, MD; Delle B. Kelley; Clark W. Heath, Jr, MD; Matthew Zack, MD
Centers for Disease Control Atlanta

JAMA. 1985;253(10):1391.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.—

In reporting an apparent excess of polycythemia vera among participants of a nuclear weapons test, we did not consider it "unscientific" to conclude that "the small individual whole-body doses of radiation reported for these four participants makes the association with ionizing radiation tenuous, although this was the only unusual risk factor." Such a conclusion is only prudent because we lacked information on potential confounding factors (eg, race, religion, marital status, and other radiation exposures) that might explain the observed excess.

We never stated that the exposure potentially received from inhaled or ingested radionuclides absorbed by these participants was minimal, only that no data were available for measuring such exposure. If such data were available, we might or might not have found that the reported patients had a higher total exposure than anyone else. Without such data, we still believe it important to have alerted the medical community by . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?