It was said yesterday that the workforce at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria is the most studied in the world. Given the work employees are engaged in - reprocessing highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel - being scrutinised by an open and accountable regime operating with the best interests of staff and their families is positive and should be encouraged. Without rigorous medical scrutiny, how can the workforce be certain that the levels of radiation to which they are exposed are within safe limits to minimise the risk of cancer?
Thanks to the prompting of the GMB trade union, we now know the extent to which certain tests were carried out between 1962 and 1992. The difficulty arises from the fact that we do not know why tests on tissue taken from the bodies of 65 deceased nuclear workers (mostly at Sellafield) were carried out, whether next of kin were informed, or if procedures were followed. These questions will be the subject of an official inquiry announced yesterday by Alistair Darling, the Trade Secretary, and led by Michael Redfern QC who, for the sake of the families involved and the secure future of medical research, must come up with answers.
Consent is at the heart of this. Paradoxically, this episode appears to have come to light because scientists sought authorisation from families, through the GMB, to study data obtained from tissue to examine the effects of radiation on the body. The union says that, when it looked into the matter, it was shocked at the lack of consent concerning the removal of tissue and of information to explain the reasons. Carrying out the work was reasonable. Such work would demonstrate that the Sellafield authorities were paying attention to the wellbeing of workers. However, as a retired coroner in England put it yesterday, it would be a shocking abuse of authority on the part of an employer to request samples from the autopsy on a deceased former employee without specifying the purpose and doing so secretly, without the informed consent of relatives. It would also seem highly unusual for such a request to be granted. It is the responsibility of Mr Redfern to establish how much of this is fact and how what happened came about. A separate inquiry is to be held into procedures at other reprocessing plants, including Dounreay.
It appears that it was the practice to take small samples (a few grammes of liver tissue, for instance) to assess the amount of plutonium in the body and compare it with urine samples taken during the employee's working life to gauge levels of exposure. According to a former senior Sellafield employee yesterday, the size of sample made it highly unlikely that permission would have been sought to proceed. At what point does size make enough of a difference for consent to be requested?
There is a principle at stake, one which was criminally disregarded at Alder Hey children's hospital, as the organ retention scandal there demonstrated. It later emerged that organs had been separately stored in Scottish hospitals without proper consent. The Human Tissue (Scotland) Act makes it an offence to retain organs and tissue without authorisation. This Act, and similar legislation in England, is too late for the families at Sellafield. But we must get to the truth of what happened there, for next of kin and to reinforce a message that a culture of "we know best" paternalism or secrecy, even in the past, is not tolerable.
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