The French establishment's response to the publication of a study linking childhood leukaemia with environmental exposure to waste from a nuclear reprocessing plant in Normandy (BMJ 1997;314:101-6) was like an immunological reaction: it was very rapid and attempted to reject a foreign body that interfered with one of its functions.
Right: The nuclear industry provides France with 80% of its power
The antigen trigger was an article by Dominique Pobel and Jean-Francois Viel, epidemiologists at the University of Besancon, which suggested a causal relation between the incidence of leukaemia and exposure to weak doses of radiation around the La Hague nuclear waste processing centre. The establishment, sensitive about any criticism concerning France's nuclear industry, which provides the country with 80% of its electrical power, immediately went on the defence.
INSERM, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, faxed to the media a press release by Jacqueline Clavel, a researcher on environment and health. She criticised Professor Viel's method of recruiting the control group through general practitioners and the fact that the study did not indicate the distance from the sea of the homes of patients and controls. The daily newspaper Liberation, which on Friday devoted two whole pages to the story, gave a lot of space to INSERM's viewpoint Ms Clavel was quoted questioning the credibility of the BMJ "It is not an epidemiological journal and it may be that the article was not evaluated by epidemiologists. Moreover, it does happen that the BMJ publishes scientifically dubious articles because polemic interests them. Possibly they wanted to launch the [radioactive risk] debate in Great Britain."
On Saturday the daily newspaper Le Monde also mentioned some of Mrs Clavel's comments, but Liberation went further and interviewed Catherine Hill, who studies mortality near nuclear plants for INSERM. Ms Hill's main criticism was that amnesia could have influenced the study findings. "How can you remember how often you went to the beach when you were pregnant twenty years earlier and where the shellfish you ate came from?" she said.
Dr Denis Berds, head of the epidemiology laboratory at the Institut de Protection et Surete Nucleaire (IPSN), told Le Monde and other media that Professor Viel's attribution of cases of leukaemia to the effects of radiation was "rather gratuitous," and is quoted by Liberation as saying the article should not have been published. However IPSN-France's nuclear watchdog-is dependent on the Atomic Energy Commission, a subsidiary of which operates the La Hague facility.
Other negative comments came, understandably enough, from the La Hague plant director Patrick Ledermann. He told the International Herald Tribune that "It is scandalous to put state control in question" and stated to Liberation that "the impact of radioactive waste on the marine environment has always been inferior to that of natural radioactivity," adding that Professor Viel's article should not have been published.
The French press, however, did not present a completely one sided picture. Both Liberation and Le Monde mentioned in their reports other studies that showed contamination around the La Hague reprocessing plant.
Liberation mentioned a study commissioned by Greenpeace from another independent laboratory, Crii-Rad, in February 1996, revealing "a grave radioactive contamination" of the La Hague environment, with nuclear pollutants found in waters, seashells and plants. Le Monte brought up a
1993 study showing radionuclide pollution of a stream near the storage centre, and interviewed Didier Anger, a locally elected ecologist who maintains that the Cogema processing plant rejects into the sea 150 times more radioactive waste than is admitted by European norms "which are edicted with more regard to industrial imperatives than to health considerations."
Many journalists also talked to Professor Viel and reported that most of the detractors were members of, or associated with, the nuclear industry. Their articles had an undeniable impact: Corinne Lepage, minister for the environment, has asked for a thorough evaluation of the study and instructed IPSN to intensify studies of the marine ecosystem. "One should not become alarmist, nor extrapolate results, but the question posed by Dr Viel is serious and underscores the need to carry out more in depth epidemiologic studies around La Hague," she said.
Alexander Dorozynski,
medical journalist
Paris
