Author denies epidemic

Deseret News
Sunday, April 5, 2009
By Lee Benson


ST. GEORGE — Daniel Miles is a mild-mannered, soft-spoken science professor who studied under the eminent Henry Eyring at the University of Utah, taught physics at Westminster College and Dixie College and now, at age 74, has settled into retirement back where he was born and raised.

He spends his days hiking with his brother, sitting on the porch with his wife, fishing with his sons, playing with his dozen grandkids or tending his fruit trees.

And just so things don't get too tranquil, he has written a book that calls southern Utah's "downwinder" cancer epidemic nothing but an overstated myth.

His book, just finished this week, is titled "The Phantom Fallout" and is available online at Amazon.com.

He hopes to soon have it in area bookstores — provided he isn't tarred and feathered first.

Miles is well-aware that he is attempting to debunk a piece of local history that has been figuratively, if not literally, cast in stone.

Suggesting that fallout from above-ground atomic tests conducted in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s didn't produce rampant health problems here is akin to someone in Europe, circa 1350, suggesting the bubonic plague was a figment of the collective population's imagination.

But Miles insists that science and hard, cold statistical facts do not back up claims of widespread cancers, leukemia in particular, and other abnormal health woes plaguing southern Utah in the post-fallout era.

"The only evidence supporting a fallout-induced cancer epidemic was and is anecdotal," he writes.

His book takes on the anecdotes, collectively and individually.

Phenomenal cancer rates since 1951? His statistics show Washington County and environs with a below-normal cancer rate, then and now, compared with the state and the rest of the country. (He also points out that four out of every 10 Americans will contract some form of cancer during their lifetime.)

Stories from the 1950s of burned skin, hair loss and children eating fallout so thick they thought it was snow? His research failed to produce any contemporary newspaper accounts or photographs documenting these accounts when they supposedly occurred. He augments that with his personal memory. He was a student at Dixie High and Dixie College during the testing and doesn't recall any visible evidence whatsoever of fallout or of fallout effects.

Leukemia running rampant in Washington County children in the 1950s? His research documents just two cases of childhood leukemia deaths in the county from 1952 through 1959.

A marked increase in birth defects caused by second-generation effects from the Nevada tests? "Back-fence gossip," writes Miles, who points to a study conducted in Japan on children of survivors of the World War II atom bombs that reveals no evidence of mutations.

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