Letter to a H Seymour, Subject: Correlation of Environmental Radiation Data with Medical Findings on the Marshallese

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Director of College Fisheries University of Washington Thank you for your letter of 16 Oct. I have intended writing you for some time about our discussion concerning correlation of environmental radiation data with our medical findings on the Marshallese. I am very anxious to pursue this aspect of the studies. I do not know whether or not YOY are aware that DOS has about decided to place the responsibility of the environmental studies at BNL where they can be more closely correlated with our medical . studies. Charlie Meinhold, head of our Health Physics Division, would head up this group and he has drawn up a 189 which I understand DOS has verbally approved. This would not officially be instituted until fiscal ’75. It is my understanding that your group at the University of Washington would continue to play an important role in these studies and the expertise of your group would nicely complement that of the BNL group. During the forthcoming survey in March-April we plan on carrying out whole body gamma spectrographic analyses and radiochemical analyses of urine and water samples. I would like very much also to have samples from the environment collected and analyzed to tie in closely with the personnel monitoring. We would like to do this at Rongelap, Bikini and possibly Utirik. In view of the probable new responsibilities at BNL Meinhold wwld like to send someone along to help and become acquainted with the survey procedures. I would be delighted if you would be willing to send someone along and these two people work together. You may have heard that there has been adverse publicity recently concerning radiation levels at Bikini and the return

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of the people co their Island. I am enclosing a copy of the “letter to the editor” on this subject by ‘L&_Wllin. I talked to Joe Deal at DOS this morning and he feels that we should make fairly exten~ve efforts to reassess the radiological status of Bikini Island. Should any of this materialize perhaps we should have a preliminary planning session at some time. In the meantime I would appreciate if you would try and collate and summarize the existing data on these Islands. Looking forward to hearing from you. With