Answer to Question #4237 Submitted to "Ask the Experts"

I lived on the island of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands from 1965 to 1970, seven years after the atomic bomb on the Islands.  I was a developing child during those years, from age 5 to 10.  I am now 43 years old.  I am interested in any information you have on the children who were on the island during the 60s who were exposed to radiation and what the half-life of the radiation is. 

My three children are all Type 1 diabetics.  There is no diabetes as far back genetically on either side of the family.  I have recently been diagnosed with a very rare condition called adductor spasmodic dysphonia.  None of these conditions are curable.  The odds of this happening to one family is in the millions.

Is there any information that links my development during those young years to damage that could result in these devastating diseases, particularly that of insulin-dependent diabetes?

Your questions are primarily medical even though they are in reference to the nuclear testing program. I don't know if there is any single person who can answer all of your questions definitively. I am a radiation physicist and I know the radiologic conditions in the Marshall Islands very well. I lived there for nearly six years (1989-1995) and directed the first nationwide radiological monitoring program to evaluate residual radiation from nuclear testing. My staff and I made radiation measurements on all atolls in the Marshall Islands including Kwajalein. Note that while I feel very certain of my responses, I can only answer with the expertise of a physicist, not as a medical practitioner.

First, I am very familiar with the scientific literature about radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands. There are no reports, to my knowledge, about children who lived on Kwajalein during the 1960s. The military would be the only organization that might have records on who those people were, but probably it does not have information on the health conditions they developed years later. Still, the military would be your only source of information that I can think of.

The residual bomb-test radiation on Kwajalein during the years you lived on Kwajalein was very, very small. You could have received an amount of radiation from residual fallout during your stay there equal to only a few percent of the natural radiation we all receive from the earth and from space each and every year. Though there are definitely some components of nuclear fallout that have long half-lives (for example, ¹³⁷Cs and ⁹⁰Sr, both with half-lives of about 30 years), you could have been exposed to very little of those. My reasons for saying that are three-fold. First, there was almost no residual radioactivity on Kwajalein (or on nearby atolls that are less developed) when I made measurements in the early 1990s, indicating the fallout was originally very low there (in agreement with all other published reports). Second, because Kwajalein is an Army base, it is largely covered by runways, roads, and other man-made structures. Hence, there was little soil to retain the radioactivity over the years that you resided there. To retain radioactivity, it is generally necessary to have soil left in place without construction activities. Fallout particles will wash away from other surfaces (roads, buildings, etc.) over time and that assuredly occurred with the heavy rains there. I am sure you remember what the island looked like and that it was well developed with few natural areas. I found this photo from the 1950s that shows most of it was covered by man-made roads and structures. Finally, the primary means of exposure to fallout radioactivity years after it was deposited is by eating foods grown in contaminated soil. There was not enough agriculture (even with a few gardens or coconuts that you might have consumed) to have made any difference.

I also know from a brief literature review that there is a strong familial relationship for Type 1 diabetes. The occurrence of Type 1 diabetes in one child elevates the risk significantly for siblings. For example, if an immediate relative (parent, brother, sister, son, or daughter) has Type 1 diabetes, one's risk of developing Type 1 diabetes is 10 to 20 times the risk of the general population and your risk can go from 1 in 100 to roughly 1 in 10 or possibly higher, depending on which family member has the diabetes and when it developed. The relationship of diabetes to radiation exposure (for which you received far too little) is not yet understood by the scientific community and if such a relationship exists, it must be very minor. I found some useful information on diabetes at this Web site though I suspect you have many other information sources available to you. The one interesting point noted there is that there may be environmental factors to trigger diabetes. It might be useful to consider all of the other unusual factors associated with living on a military base.

Finally, the other condition you mentioned, adductor spasmodic dysphonia, has never, to my knowledge, been associated with any level of radiation exposure.

In my view, it is important that you realize that there were other risks from living on a military base in the tropics and those were likely to have been large compared to that from residual fallout radiation. Those would include the near continual presence of airplane fuel fumes, many types of chemicals, high-intensity radar, very high sunlight, etc. All of those features may have increased your risk to unusual health conditions, though it is impossible for me to evaluate them.

I realize that my answer does not answer your questions about the causes of health conditions in your family. But residual fallout radiation in my professional opinion could not explain them. I hope this information is helpful.

Steven L. Simon, PhD