(February 11, 1994) A US researcher has argued that Japanese doctors were banned from actively treating survivors of the 1945 atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
(406.4019) WISE Amsterdam - David Wiesner from San Francisco said that he had studied treatment of A-bomb survivors during the US occupation of Japan after World War II. "The American military authorities ordered Japanese physicians to perform medical studies on the survivors, but forbade the doctors from giving them active treatment. The reasons were not clear at the time, but the recent revelations about American citizens being irradiated and studies without their knowledge point to a possible explanation". The US government seized and classified all the survivors' medical records and brought them back to the US, government sources said.
Wiesner asked the US Energy secretary Hazel O'Leary to release all documents related to medical studies performed on survivors of the 1945 dropping of A-bombs. Wiesner did that on the first of several gatherings scheduled across the US to hear proposals on how to declassify the US nuclear secrets. O'Leary's reply: "I'll put it on the list".
The A-bombs killed an estimated 140,000 at Hiroshima and about 73,000 at Nagasaki.
Source: Greenbase, 13 January 1994
Contact: Japan Congress Against A-And H-Bombs (GENSUIKIN), Chiyo-da-ku, Tokyo 101, Japan. Tel: +81 3 3222-1091; Fax: +81 3 3222-1093