Abstract
The authors show that factors other than fission products in the diet cannot explain the large regional differences in recent breast cancer mortality rates across the United States described in their original article. The highly detailed county-level data for many types of radiation-related cancers collected in a 1990 National Cancer Institute (NCI) study indicate that when aggregated for the 62 nuclear facilities examined, the locally exposed county populations experienced a highly significant greater rise since 1950 than the United States as a whole, although this was not pointed out in the summary of the NCI study. Yet the entire U.S. population, with comparable genetic predisposition and other individual factors, was randomly exposed to comparable levels of pesticides, herbicides, exogenous hormones, air pollution, petrochemicals, cigarette smoke, alcohol, and fat in the diet. Moreover, a recently obtained NCI breast cancer data base for counties shows that the oldest of the weapons-related facilities taken together and known to have had the largest cumulative releases of fission products had by far the greatest breast cancer rises in the local counties, namely 33 percent, compared with 6 percent for all 62 facilities combined, and only 2 percent for the United States as a whole, further supporting a clear dose response.
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