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Labs should test staff blood
The Daily Planet received this letter addressed to the Environmental Sampling Project Task Force at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:
In order to assess the health risks and damage due to exposure to tritium (radioactive hydrogen), three blood tests should be done on the director of the Tritium Labeling Facility, local workers and nearby residents. The director at the Lawrence Hall of Science and workers there should also be tested since they are downwind.
These tests are:
1. Check the white blood cells for the presence of micronuclei.
2. Check the red blood cells for glycophorin-A molecule change.
3. Chromosome painting.
The presence of micronuclei in white blood cells indicates the loss of proper DNA repair processes, leading to increased cancer risk and other health problems.
Micronuclei is one of the most useful tests for potential and actual cancer and other health risks.
Genetic modification of the glycophorin-A molecules on the surface of the red blood cells is also an indicator of DNA damage.
This method was used in a study by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Japanese exposed to nuclear bombs.
The study on DNA damage indicated that after 40 years, the DNA code for making that molecule did not get repaired.
The damage was worse the closer victims were to ground zero.
UC-LBNL could preempt epidemiological studies that would search and compile the number of dead, deformed, and diseased bodies that may or may not be correlated with some possible, real, or known hazard such as tritium.
The importance of these simple tests which you can do might ease the concern of the public.
Marion Fulk
Retired Staff Scientist Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Doctors should label service dogs, not their owners
Editor:
In her response to a Jan. 15 letter to the editor, Karen Craig claims that “the Americans with Disabilities Act states clearly that it is a violation of the ADA to ask a person, ‘What is your disability?’”
Outside of passages regarding job interviews, I am unable to find such a passage in the text of the law.
As I noted in my letter, the Justice Department’s guidelines on service-animal regulations say only that documentation “generally may not be required.”
In any case, I never meant to suggest that persons with no apparent disability whose service animals perform no apparent service should be required to disclose their disability to anyone other than their doctors.
It would be sufficient for a doctor to provide a letter identifying the service animal as such, without further details.
As for Michael Minasian’s letter citing a statute that prohibits passing off a pet as a service animal, if, as he argues, police may not require any proof beyond the owner’s say-so, it is hard to see how the statute could ever be enforced.
Robert Lauriston
Berkeley
