The Committee considered a report of negotiations with the two dissenting members on possible alternative sections to the main chapters of the report. During these negotiations the Committee had made considerable efforts to attempt to reach an acceptable compromise, however the two members had not responded to the Committee's wishes to secure shorter versions, as currently they were longer than the main report chapters and their biology paper was almost twice as long as the biology text of the main report. Another member had précised the dissenting contributions but the two dissenting members did not accept the précis versions. Another problem was that the versions contained new material which had not been considered by the Committee.

A member added that that what the public would like to see is a clear explanation of why the two members dissented from current approaches to radiation risks and from the main report: the present long dissenting drafts did not provide this. It was then suggested that the two members should join their draft sections into a separate statement at the end of the report. However the Committee were reminded that much of the main report was directly concerned with issues raised by the two dissenting members: indeed most of the Committee's agenda had been determined by their expressed interests. In addition, the views of the dissenting members on all substantive issues had been scrupulously included in the main chapters considered by the Committee, including drafting changes suggested by the two dissenting members. Now the Committee were considering a dissenting statement but this might be inconsistent with the request by Ministers to seek as much consensus as possible.

The two members proposed that they would redraft the dissenting statements to make them shorter and the Committee agreed to this. In view of the shortness of time, the decision on the acceptability of the drafts would be taken by the Chairman if necessary after consulting the other members.


The Committee considered papers which reported on their four epidemiology studies. The report on GB health effects following the Chernobyl fallout (Study A) contained the analyses carried by sub Committee members. The data revealed a slight excess of infant leukemias in GB following the Chernobyl accident, but this excess was not statistically significant. In particular, the 95% confidence intervals for the relative risks encompassed values either side of 1.0. Although the data could indicate the existence of a trend with dose, the data were too sparse to allow firm conclusions to be drawn about radiation risk estimates. However other members disagreed that just because the results did not pass the test of statistical significance, the findings did not need further discussion.

The report of their study on GB health effects following test bomb fallout (Study B) contained the analyses carried out by the sub-Committee's members which did not indicate evidence of an increase in GB infant or childhood leukemias following exposures to test bomb fallout in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Their proposed study on cancer rates near Bradwell: the estuarine hypothesis (Study C) had been cancelled mainly because of the failure of the sub-Committee to reach agreement on study parameters and lack of time to resolve this. In addition, their proposed study on GB cancers in second generation following test bomb fallout (Study D) had also been cancelled mainly due to the lack of time to fulfil the lengthy procedural requirements for patient confidentiality before obtaining any data.


The Committee considered more draft chapters for their final report in considerable detail and agreed to incorporate further changes suggested by groups of members working together, including proposed drafting changes by the two dissenting members.

Next (Meeting 16)