Sixth death linked to radiation scare lab

Comment: not a good place to work: Radiation kills!

April 24, 2009

A SIXTH person who worked in a university building linked with a radiation scare has died from cancer.

Professor Tom Whiston, 70, worked in Manchester University's Rutherford Building and developed terminal cancer.

The building once housed the laboratories used by physicist Ernest Rutherford, who worked with radioactive materials.

Prof Whiston and two of his former colleagues - Dr Hugh Wagner, 62, and Dr Arthur Reader, 69 - all died from pancreatic cancer.

A colleague of Dr Wagner, John Clark died of a brain tumour in the 1990s.

Computer assistant Vanessa Santos-Leitao, 25, also died of a brain tumour in February 2008.

Relatives of Moira Joy Hayward, who died of cancer in 1984, aged 48 and had worked in the Rutherford building when she was younger, also fear her death is linked.

The university has asked Prof David Coggon, an expert in work place disease at Southampton University, to investigate the cluster of deaths. University bosses insist there is no evidence of any risk to staff.

Prof Whiston, a respected expert in science and technology policy, had been based in the former Rutherford rooms for a number of years.

He is thought to have left Manchester University in the 1980s and had been living in Brighton, where he was an honorary professor at the University of Sussex.

Liz Graham, a Manchester solicitor acting on behalf of some of the families of former occupants, said she had spoken with members of Prof Whiston's family following his death. She said: "Prof Whiston died on April 11 at home in Brighton. I met with him earlier in his illness. He was a very well respected and well travelled academic.

"He worked in the same rooms used by Ernest Rutherford, in the rooms used by Dr Reader and Dr Wagner. Pancreatic cancer is quite a rare form of cancer. Questions need to be asked about whether there is a link."

Rutherford famously carried out studies into atomic structure which used highly radioactive substances between 1907 and 1919.



http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1111768_sixth_death_linked_to_radiation_scare_lab