Hanford Downwinders: Trisha Thompson Pritikin

Trisha Pritikin is an ardent activist for the Hanford Downwinders

Photo courtesy of Pritikin family

Article written by Julianna Amante

Trisha Pritikin is a lawyer, writer, mother, downwinder, and most of all, an ardent activist. She served on the Hanford Health Effects Subcommittee (HHES), run by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). She has demanded accountability from federal agencies addressing civilian downwinder issues, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The National Academy of Science (NAS), and the National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH). ^[1] Her 2020 book, The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, is an anthology of downwinder stories interwoven with a chronological narrative on toxic tort litigation filed by civilian downwinders of the Nevada Test Site and Hanford.

In 1947, Trisha’s parents, Perry and Lesley Thompson, moved to Richland, Washington, and Perry began working as a safety engineer for General Electric, then the primary Hanford contractor.^[2] Shortly thereafter, Lesley gave birth to a son at Kadlec Hospital in Richland. He died several weeks after birth due to unknown causes.^[3] Neonatal and infant death in the area was reportedly 20% higher than the national average during Hanford’s years of operation.^[4] In early 1950 they conceived again and their only surviving child, Trisha, was born on October 26^th, 1950.^[5] Beginning the fifth month of pregnancy, radioactive iodine Lesley inhaled and ingested from local foods crossed the placental border. As an infant and child, Pritikin breathed air and drank milk infused with Iodine-131. Her family often boated on the Columbia River. Trisha remembers playing on sandy islands mid-river that she later learned were contaminated with Cobalt-60 effluent from Hanford and swimming in spots in the river warmed by radioactive waste from Hanford’s reactors. As is common with low dose ionizing radiation, Trisha’s early exposure to Hanford radiation took its toll only years later after she moved away from the Hanford area.^[6]

In 1960, Trisha’s father was transferred to San Jose, California, and then to GE’s international operations in Spain. Pritikin began to experience unexplained weight fluctuations, fatigue, and cessation of menstruation. Her parents sent her back to the US for treatment. Later, while studying occupational therapy at the University of Washington, her fatigue worsened. A lymph node in her neck became enlarged, and she was diagnosed with a rare infection known as cat scratch fever, suggesting a severely suppressed immune system. As the years passed and her symptoms worsened, she suffered from severe headaches and digestive issues.^[7]

In 1980, Pritikin moved to San Francisco to begin law school. There, she experienced the first symptoms of autoimmune thyroiditis as her thyroid began to destroy itself. Periods of hyperthyroidism, which felt like severe panic attacks, alternated with periods of hypothyroidism. In 1981, she collapsed with extreme chest pain. Rushed to the hospital, she was eventually diagnosed with esophageal contraction, a side-effect of her still-undiagnosed autoimmune thyroiditis. Pritikin persisted through these mysterious and painful health problems, graduating law school in 1983.^[8]

Pritikin married in 1985 and began visiting a fertility clinic after difficulty conceiving. The increasingly intrusive tests could not identify the cause.^[9] It wasn’t until 1988, while visiting her grandmother in Spokane, Washington, that she happened upon an article in the Spokesman Review by investigative reporter Karen Dorn Steele. The article revealed that airborne radioactive iodine had been released at Hanford in the 1940s and that radioactive iodine can harm the thyroid. Further testing at the clinic revealed that she had autoimmune thyroiditis, also known as Hashimoto's disease. Her immune system had destroyed her thyroid and she was in danger of falling into a hypothyroid coma. After receiving a synthetic hormone, Pritikin became pregnant almost immediately. She would later learn that Hanford continued releasing airborne radioiodine into the 1960s. ^[10]

Pritikin believes her disease (and the suffering of other Hanford Downwinders) could have been treated far earlier if federal officials had been truthful about Hanford’s radiation releases. Government lies and cover-up led to debilitating conditions and death for many, including her parents. Perry died of aggressive thyroid cancer, likely the result of exposures on and off the job. Lesley developed autoimmune thyroiditis and other illnesses. She eventually succumbed to malignant melanoma.^[11]

Pritikin’s work on behalf of Hanford downwinders began with a meeting she organized in 1989 in Oakland, California, for the many people in the region who had moved there from the Hanford area. In 1998-1999, she filed an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit to force the Department of Energy to meet its legal obligation to pay for ATSDR’s recommended medical monitoring of up to 14,000 highly-exposed downwinders.^[12] In 2013, she was selected as a bellwether in the 2^nd round of bellwether jury trials against the contractors that had operated Hanford, although the case settled before the second group of bellwether plaintiffs were heard. Throughout twenty four years of litigation, only the stories of three bellwethers had been heard in a court of law before a jury of their peers.

Footnotes
^[1] Trisha Pritikin, Oral History Interview by Michael O’Rourke, November 13, 1999, Hanford Health Information Archives collection, AR69-2-0-21, Series 1: Donor Materials, Donor 215, 38-40. Washington State Archives.
^[2] Pritikin, Oral History, 23.
^[3] Pritikin, Oral History, 9.
^[4] Trisha Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2020), 14.
^[5] Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, 255.
^[6] Pritikin, Oral History, 3.
^[7] Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, 257-258.
^[8] Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, 258-259.
^[9] Pritikin, Oral History, 19.
^[10] Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, 260.
^[11] Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, 259-261.
^[12] Karen Dorn Steele, “Introduction,” in Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, 13.
^[13] Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs, xii.

Bibliography

•  Pritikin, Trisha T. The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020.
• Pritikin, Trisha T. Oral History interview by by Michael O’Rourke. November 13, 1999. Hanford Health Information Archives collection, AR69-2-0-21, Series 1: Donor Materials, Donor 215. Washington State Archives.
• Pritikin, Trisha T.  Telephone interview with Julianna Amante.  August 9, 2024.