Panel recommends payments for Mallinckrodt workers

[struggle4progress]

By Sara Shipley
Of the Post-Dispatch
02/10/2005

Sick, aging nuclear workers in the St. Louis area won an important battle this week when a federal advisory panel recommended automatic $150,000 payments for certain workers at Mallinckrodt Chemical Co.

The decision, which must be approved by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Congress, marked the first time that the special status had been granted to any group since Congress created the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation program in 2000. The program is supposed to compensate “Cold War warriors” who helped build nuclear bombs, but only a fraction of applicants have been paid. <snip>

Normally, under the program, workers must go through a tedious process of proving that they received enough radiation to cause their illness. Brock argued that it would be impossible to accurately reconstruct radiation exposure because many Mallinckrodt workers were never monitored for radiation exposure, or their records were missing or manipulated.

The panel agreed, recommending automatic payments for employees who worked at Mallinckrodt’s downtown facility between 1942 and 1948 and had one of 22 specific cancers. In order to qualify, workers must have been at the downtown site during that time period for 250 days, which is considered to be a full work year. Survivors also qualify. <snip>

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Women fight for nuclear workers
By Sara Shipley
Of the Post-Dispatch
02/13/2005

<snip> "When you watch a loved one die the way my father died, you do everything you can because you want to see them smiling at you" from heaven, said Ehlmann, of Wright City. Her father, Everett Powers, was exposed to large amounts of radiation during his 24 years at Mallinckrodt.

The federal panel's decision, made at a meeting in St. Louis last Tuesday, marks an important victory for hundreds of sick, aging nuclear workers and their families in St. Louis.

An estimated 3,500 people labored in the dangerous early days of the atom bomb program in the St. Louis area, processing uranium and doing other tasks at sites in downtown St. Louis, Weldon Spring, Hematite and other locations. They asked few questions about the dirty nature of their work in defense of the nation, and decades later many died of radiation-related cancer.

Congress created the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation program in 2000 to compensate "Cold War warriors" who helped build nuclear bombs, but thousands of applicants are caught in a thicket of red tape trying to prove their claims. To date, about 24 percent of the 62,000 claims filed nationwide have been paid. <snip>

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