Scientists admit error on cancers

Some of the scientists who cast doubt on whether France's nuclear tests in Polynesia caused cancer among Pacific Islanders are saying they might have been wrong, the New Scientist magazine reports.

Claude Parmentier of the nuclear medicine department at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France, and colleagues said they had found that 30 people in Polynesia with thyroid cancer had three times as many abnormalities in their chromosomes as people in Europe with the same disease.

"These abnormalities in the chromosomes are a sign of radiation damage," they said in an European journal of nuclear medicine.

France exploded 41 nuclear bombs above the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls between 1966 and 1974.

Islanders in the region have since suffered high rates of thyroid cancers, but have had difficulty proving that this was due to fallout from the explosions.

Now the latest French research indicated the abnormalities were a sign of radiation damage and were associated with an increased risk of cancer.

"These preliminary findings are compatible with possible previous environmental aggression," the researchers wrote.

Sue Roff, an expert on nuclear tests from the University of Dundee in Britain, told the New Scientist that the researchers were "a very conservative group of scientists who in the past have doubted whether the nuclear tests caused thyroid cancers".

"For them to now propose a connection is quite startling."

- NZPA