Document 93v1Kjyvza33p0mdBk9jz6RYq

FILE NAME Newspaper & Magazine Articles NMA DATE 1973 June 19 DOC NMA075 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION NYT - Test For Cancer Set in Minnesota TEST FOR CANCER SET IN MINNESOTA By JANE E. BRODY New York Times Currentfile Jun 19 1973 ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times 1851 - 2002 9 TEST FOR CANCER SET INMINNESOTA 2 Doctors to Check on Risk From Asbestos in Water By JANE E. BRODY Two international experts on environmentally caused can- cer left last night for Duluth Minn to set up a crash testing program to try to determine whether asbestos fibers detected in the city's drinking water presented a risk of cancer to its 100,600 residents The source of the fibers ac cording to an announcement by the United States Environ- mental Protection Agency last week was believed to be the 67,000 tons of waste rock tail ings that have been dumped daily for the last 16 years into Lake Superior by the Reserve Mining Company a taconite processing plant in Silver Bay Minn The tailings have been found to contain asbestos particles Duluth and at least eight other communities bordering Lake Superior use water from the lake once thought to be extremely pure for drinking purposes Study of Tissues The two cancer experts Dr. E. Cuyler Hammond biostatistician for the American Cancer Society and Dr. Irving J. Selik off who heads the Environ mental Sciences Laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital here will compare compare the accumulation of asbestos fibers in the tissues of Duluth residents with that of asbestos workers and of people with no known exposure to the mineral Dr. Selikoff has set up his staff to work hour shifts around the clock so that results of the tissue tests done on organs obtained at autopsy might be available in a few weeks In light of the seriousness of the potential hazard we are condensing three months work into three weeks Dr. Selikoff said in an interview before leav- ing for Minnesota His concern stemmed from findings by him and his colleagues as well as by other researchers which showed that abestos workers had high death rates from cancer of the lung stomach and colon Through the years these workers accumu lated and retained large amounts of asbestos fibers in their body tissues In asbestos workers whose exposure to the fibers has been mainly through inhalation the asbestos cancers gen- erally not show up for 20 or 30 years It was not known whether consumption of the fibers through drinking water would present a similar risk However Dr. Selikoff said If the residents of Duluth have similar accumulations of asbestos as do the asbestos work ers we can pretty well pre dict what's going to happen 5 or 10 years from now At the same time Dr. Ham mond and the American Can cer Society will analyze the death records of 3.000 Duluth residents who have been part of a national cancer survey of one million persons followed since 1959. Dr. Hammond will look for possible early signs of increased deaths from can cer particularly that of the gastrointestinal tract Dr. William J. Nicholson a biophysicist from Dr. Selikoff's laboratory which is a icenter for the National Insti- tute for Environmental Hea terday morning terday morningtotoDulubetgihn y a lyzing samples of the city's : and water and locally mar factured food products . The Reserve plant at Silv pel ets which extracts iron c pellets from taconite ra mined along the Minnesota Ir Range has been involved a court battle with state a Federal agencies that ha been trying for a decade stop the company's pollution Lake Superior GIVING BEGETS JOY GIVE FRESH AIR FUND Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner Further reproduction prohibited without permission