Most Sinister Development : Wireless Technology

Dr. Alice Stewart, a great pioneer of understanding the radiation problem

'The lesson we must learn is not to do anything that would allow the level of background radiation to rise any further'

Dr. Alice Stewart, 1986

In Oxford, England Alice Stewart formed a scientific research team with David Hewitt and Josephine Webb. Before long, their focus of particular interest became the disease known as leukemia.

Statistical work undertaken by David Hewitt revealed to them that "..leukemia was mainly affecting people over fifty.." and, curiously "..children between the ages of two and four.." David Hewitt also "..showed that the type of leukemia affecting the children, lymphatic, was different from the type that adults generally got, myeloid. And he showed that children were getting leukemia much more in countries with better medical care and lower death rates..." (Dr. Alice Stewart)

Dr. Stewart suggested that the team embark on an epidemiological project which would question the mothers of children who had died of this disease to "..find out whether something had happened before birth..." (ASt) 

And so, it came to pass that circumstances, thinking and understanding developed to the point that: "The researchers drew up a proposal to implement a nationwide interviewing of mothers of children who'd died of leukemia and other forms of cancer between 1953 and 1955." (ASt)

After a lot of work, involving a great deal of countrywide travel to obtain the required data, the survey - referred to as The Oxford Survey of Childhood Cancer - was successfully carried out, having had the assistance of a £1,000 grant.

Alice Stewart: "We started out with approximately five hundred leukemia deaths, matching them up with five hundred deaths from other forms of cancer and one thousand live children of the same age, sex and region. And when we came to tally up the findings, we made an astounding discovery: both groups of dead children - those who died from leukemia and those who died from solid tumours - had been x-rayed before birth twice as often as the live children.

We could see it quite early on, from the first thirty-five pairs: Yes was turning up three times for every dead child to once for every live child, for the question, 'had you had an obstetric x-ray?' Yes was running three to one. It was an astonishing difference. It was a shocker. They were as like as two peas in a pod, the living and the dead; they were alike in all respects except on that score. And the dose was very small, very brief, a single diagnostic x-ray, a tiny fraction of the radiation exposure considered safe, and it wasn't repeated. It was enough to almost double the risk of an early cancer death..."

A preliminary report on their findings was published in 1956 in Lancet.. and, there was a lot of praise for it...

Alice Stewart: "But then a reaction set in and the mood changed. It was as though I'd trod on someone's corns. The medical profession didn't like it. The obstetricians came down on me like a ton of bricks - how dare I say that x-rays are dangerous? They saw me as interfering in their practices. The radiologists were oddly divided. Some were very pleased - they said, 'thank goodness you've come along, we've been forced to work with this deficient machinery all these years, now National Health will have to give us new equipment'. But most thought I was taking the bread out of their mouths - they were afraid people would stop using x-rays..."

To learn more and better understand the survey - how it first came about, was reported and the long-term aftermath in terms of further research and the global response to it, I recommend 'The Woman Who Knew Too Much' by Gayle Greene, from which the Dr. Stewart quotes here are excerpted.

According to biographer, Gayle Greene: 'It took until 1980 before the major American medical groups recommended that doctors not routinely x-ray pregnant women - and even so, 266,000 pregnant women were x-rayed in that year...' She quotes Alice Stewart as saying:

"..we gradually, over the years, made the profession and the public uncomfortable about medical x-rays..

..It takes about twenty years. It usually takes that long for an unpopular discovery to be digested, and you're lucky if it only takes that long."


Sunday Independent
October 12, 1986

Cancer threat to children 'on increase'

THE RISK of children developing cancer is permanently increased by every escape of radiation into the environment, a leading specialist said yesterday.

Background radiation causes at least 70 per cent of cancer in children, Dr. Alice Stewart of Birmingham University said in Cork.

The amount of radiation in the world has doubled in the past 50 years, mainly because of nuclear weapons testing and leakages from nuclear energy plants such as Sellafield and Chernobyl, she told the Irish Federation of University Women.

"Every time the atom is split, we release more radiation into the environment," said Dr. Stewart, who is well-known for her research on the link between x-rays and childhood cancer.

At present levels, 1,000 children out of one million born this year will develop cancer over the next ten years.

Children contract cancer while still in the womb and when they are their most sensitive to background and x-ray radiation for the first month after conception.

Dr. Stewart discovered that children from better-off families are more likely to get cancer and children from less affluent homes tend to die first from other ailments.

"The lesson we must learn is not to do anything that would allow the level of background radiation to rise any further," she advised.