Contact: Rob Ostrander 202.224.7627 Shana Stribling 202.224.0309
Tuesday, January 25, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Senator Kit Bond, who has made getting former Mallinckrodt workers the help they deserve a top priority, again called on federal health officials to grant the Cold War-era workers a special designation that would expedite compensation to assist the workers and their families in paying medical costs linked to factory-related illnesses.

“Mr. Secretary, these former Mallinckrodt workers and their survivors have waited over 50 years for the federal government to compensate them for the heroic and costly sacrifices they made in helping America win the Cold War. It is now time for America to help them,” wrote Bond to HHS Secretary Thompson.

NIOSH and its Advisory Board on Radiation Safety and Worker Health is scheduled to be in St. Louis in early February to recommend a decision on the SEC for the downtown Mallinckrodt site. Bond stressed to Secretary Thompson that a “full cohort” recommendation for all the former workers at the site is the only prudent way to bring long waited justice to these Cold War warriors.

“Senator Kit Bond made a commitment to the workers and surviving family members of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works and has tirelessly worked to see this through, including making our SEC status one of his priorities and has helped push this issue into the forefront,” said employee advocate Denise Brock.

The St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Chemical Company's nuclear production facilities employed about 3,500 people who were exposed to large doses of radiation, but those workers have not been granted a special federal health designation from the federal government.

The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA), enacted in 2000, was designed to compensate former energy workers who were exposed to high levels of radioactive materials. One component of the legislation involved creating Special Exposure Cohort (SEC) sites. An SEC site is a group of employees with specific cancers who worked with nuclear materials or participated in nuclear weapons tests. Employees who are designated as an SEC under the Act are entitled to expedited medical cost payments of $150,000.

Bond came close to winning SEC designation for the former Mallinckrodt workers through a legislative fix last year and has continued to urge federal officials to add the Mallinckrodt sites in Missouri to the list of existing SEC sites. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has the authority to declare a site or class of workers as an SEC.

According to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), there are two requirements for creating an SEC: if it is not feasible to estimate accurately the radiation dose employees received, and two, if there is a reasonable likelihood that such a radiation dose endangered the health of members of this class. Bond is convinced that the Mallinckrodt sites in Downtown St. Louis and Weldon Springs meet these criteria.

Bond said Mallinckrodt workers should be designated an SEC since their circumstances are very similar to sites already designated as SEC sites in Kentucky, Alaska and Tennessee; they processed plutonium; and involved the loss and/or destruction of records. Bond emphasized that in addition to the already compelling existing evidence in the Mallinckrodt workers case, new evidence of these missing records have been uncovered by Bond’s office over the past year that demonstrate it is simply not feasible for NIOSH to perform dose reconstruction for these workers with any degree of accuracy or credibility.