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From: LLL on 20 Feb 2006 20:17
A recent article in the Los Angeles Daily News featured a woman who had
lived in a trailer park immediately adjacent to the Rocketdyne liquid
rocket facility at the west end of the San Fernando Valley in the
1980s. A little over a decade later she suffered from thyroid cancer,
melanoma, and breast cancer. The URL for the story is

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_3474492

but it now may be a dud. If that's the case you can probably find it in
the paper's archives under "Rocketdyne."

The current epidemiological examination of the workers at that liquid
rocket facility has just been published, and shows elevated incidence
of lung cancer above what one would expect from cigarette smoking. This
isn't very surprising since the unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine used
in liquid rockets oxidizes into nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) upon
contact with air, and NDMA is the most potent carcinogen in second-hand
cigarette smoke.

To view the study abstract, go to Pubmed:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi


and type in the Pubmed ID number 16477255

In case I've got the number wrong the authors are Zhao, Krishnadasan,
Kennedy, Morgenstern, and Ritz of the UCLA Epidemiology Dept, the title
is "Estimated Effects of Hydrazine Exposure on Cancer Incidence and
Mortality in Aerospace Workers"

The relevant question for this woman's case of thyroid/skin/breast
cancers is whether or not she was also sufficiently exposed to
hydrazine/NDMA in conjunction with other factors like perchlorate and
radiation to produce her thyroid cancer. The latest information on
synergistic effects between goitrogens like perchlorate and methylating
agents like NDMA comes from rat studies in Japan, Pubmed ID 16367917

One reason this woman was featured in the article is that she also
suffered from melanoma, and research conducted by the same
epidemiological team at UCLA found a spatial relationship between
incidence of melanoma amongst Hispanics and proximity to Rocketdyne.

Here is an article about that off-site study:

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3313&IssueNum=141

In rats radiolabeled perchlorate has a longer half-life in skin (32
hours) than in the thyroid or blood (8 hours) PubMed ID 12140178 .
Perchlorate absorbs far ultraviolet light and becomes more reactive.
None of the Dept. of Defense or EPA researchers I spoke with could
answer the question of whether or not far UV reachs the perchlorate
accumulated in the skin -- it's an open issue.


The woman in the Daily News article, who lived on Rocketdyne's eastern
perimeter, has to wonder if both her thyroid and skin cancer were
byproducts of industral operations at Rocketdyne.

The UCLA researchers also find a higher incidence of kidney cancer
amongst workers exposed to TCE, an association supported in other
studies.

See PubMed ID 16167347

This has the ring of truth for me personally, because I knew the family
of the fellow who worked at our Aerojet rocket plant who disposed of
TCE by burning it in ammonium perchlorate on giant concrete pads -- he
died from kidney cancer. Likewise, the folks who first tipped me off
about our hidden rocket fuel contamination were the officemates of a
millionaire named Ron Pizer who founded a research firm
http://www.folsom.com . Pizer was dying of leukemia at the time. Prior
to 1967 Pizer had worked sonogramming Titan rocket engines for Aerojet.


The UCLA study finds a subset of hydrazine-exposed workers who had
leukemia and lymphoma, but there is even a stronger incidence of
leukemia and melanoma amongst the Rocketdyne machinists who worked
with "mineral oil." A co-exposure the UCLA epidemiologists may have
missed amongst those they classified as "hydrazine-exposed" who worked
at the liquid rocket test stands is the rocket fuel known as RP-1
kerosene, which is a highly refined mineral oil. At Aerojet, the Titan
I tested in the 1950s used RP-1, but by 1960 they were working with
hydrazine on the Titan II. RP-1 may also figure into the case of the
woman with thyroid, skin, and breast cancer who lived next to the
liquid rocket test stand.

LLL

http://www.perchlorate.org

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