O-136 New research on the continued health burdens of uranium miners: implications for workers compensation in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction The US Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) provides compensation to some workers whose health was affected by uranium industry employment. Originally scheduled to terminate in 2022, the US government recently extended RECA benefits for two more years. Another RECA amendment proposes to extend the deadline further, defines additional compensable diseases, and expands eligibility to more contemporary uranium miners. Materials and Methods Researchers at NIOSH conduct extended follow-up on the cohort of US Colorado Plateau uranium miners, and participate in the international Pooled Uranium Miners Analysis (PUMA). Here we apply our recent research findings from both studies to contextualize the health burdens faced by surviving uranium miners, and examine how our research findings relate to the proposed extension and expansion of RECA. Results Former US uranium miners die of silicosis (Standardized Mortality Ratio (SMR)=41.4; 95%CI:30.9–54.3), pneumoconiosis (SMR=39.6; 95%CI:29.3–52.3), idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (SMR=4.8; 95%CI:3.7–6.1), and lung cancer (SMR=4.5; 95%CI:4.2–4.9) at higher rates than expected. These mortality excesses continue to be observed in recent calendar years. In the PUMA study, uranium miners had higher rates of lung, liver, larynx, stomach, and pleural cancers than expected, and miners hired in later periods also had higher rates of lung and stomach cancer than expected. A positive association between radon exposure and lung cancer mortality is seen in the full PUMA cohort as well as in the sub-cohort of more contemporary miners. Conclusions Recent analyses suggest there be more US uranium miners who develop compensable diseases after the planned termination of RECA benefits in 2024. Uranium miners die at elevated rates from several cancer types that are not currently compensable. Contemporary uranium miners who are ineligible for compensation due to their employment dates experience many of the same health hazards as early-period miners. The proposed amendments to RECA are generally consistent with recent scientific results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".