Radiation Test Victims to Get $4.8 Million

The government has agreed to pay $4.8 million to settle the claims of 12 unwitting victims of radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War era, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary announced Tuesday.

The settlements, representing the largest payout in the radiation controversy so far, are to compensate people injected with plutonium or uranium without their knowledge as part of secret research conducted by the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission after World War II, officials said. The money will go to one survivor and the families of 11 other victims who have died.

O’Leary said the agreement results from a decision three years ago by the Clinton administration to disclose thousands of documents relating to human radiation testing, and a subsequent study by a presidential advisory commission.

Most of the human experiments sprang from efforts to develop atomic weapons and were intended to learn the effects of atomic bombs on the human body. O’Leary said Tuesday that “never again should tests be performed on human beings” without their explicit consent. Records that she released in 1993 and 1994 led to an investigation and recommendations by the advisory panel in October 1995. Those included a call for compensation payments to 18 patients subjected to radiation injections in 1946 and 1947 at hospitals in New York, California, Illinois and Tennessee.

Of those 18, most of the 12 receiving the current settlements--calculated at $400,000 apiece--had been patients at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, officials said. One other claim was settled for $400,000 last spring, and others are pending.

O’Leary, in making the announcement to the American Public Health Assn. in New York, said the settlement “goes to the very heart of the moral accountability the government owes its citizens.”

“We are grateful to these families for the tough lessons they have taught us about trust, responsibility and accountability between the government and the people,” she said.

The Energy Department concluded last year that government agencies had conducted 435 documented radiation experiments between World War II and the mid-1970s on about 16,000 Americans, some of whom did not know of the health risks. Victims included many prison inmates.

Officials said documents that were available left unclear the extent of consent by the subjects. In addition, there was no way to know the full effects of the experiments on all the individuals because in many cases, the government kept no record of their names, authorities said.

The government paid research institutes for information about the results of heavy doses of radiation on patients as part of an effort to gauge how it would affect military personnel in the event of a nuclear blast.

While the experiments raised questions of medical ethics, they led to some medical breakthroughs. One official said they were instrumental in diagnosing and treating thyroid problems, heart disease, cancer and other conditions. Very high doses of radiation were used in some cases, particularly on terminally ill patients.

“It was a rotten thing to do,” Luther Schultz of Geneva, N.Y., whose mother was injected with plutonium in 1945, told the Associated Press. “If people had been notified and knew what they were doing, it would be a different thing. But this was just picking people out and shooting poison into them--I’m pretty bitter about that.”

Schultz’s mother died 11 years ago at age 83. Doctors, however, were unable to say whether her health was affected by the experiment.