By Brian Carnell

Thursday, August 29, 2002

Yet another study has looked at and refuted claims that the Sellafield nuclear plant in Great Britain was somehow responsible for cancer clusters that appeared in communities near the plant in the 1970s and 1980s.

The theory advanced to explain the clusters has been that children born to parents who worked at the Sellafield plant or at other nuclear power plants in Great Britain had a higher-than-normal risk of childhood cancers.

In 1999, a study examined the medical histories of more than 46,000 children who had at least one parent working at one of the implicated nuclear power plants. The study found that whose children had the same rate of childhood cancers as did children who didn't have any parents who worked at the plant. Several other studies also found no link.

The latest study looked at the children of men who worked at the Sellafield plant. It found that although there was a small cancer cluster at Seascale -- which started the whole Sellafield hysteria -- children of parents who worked at the plant were no more likely to contract childhood cancers than were children whose parents did not work at the plant.

Source:

Child cancers 'not caused by Sellafield'. The BBC, August 15, 2002.

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