PARIS

The chairman of a commission of inquiry investigating claims of a slight increase in leukaemias among children living close to the nuclear reprocessing plant at La Hague, on France's northern coast, has resigned following a series of public statements voicing his doubts about the scale of the danger.

The inquiry was set up earlier this year by the ministries of health and of the environment under the former government of Alain Juppé following the publication of the claims in the British Medical Journal in January by a team headed by Jean-François Viel of the University of Besançon.

Officials say that the resignation of Charles Souleau, dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy in Chateny-Malabry outside Paris, is unlikely to have a significant impact on the work of the commission. The inquiry is focusing on two particular aspects: radioecology, under the direction of Annie Sugier of the Institute of Nuclear Protection, and safety and epidemiology, under André Spira of the medical research agency INSERM. Both were nominated by the government last week.

Souleau's departure is the logical consequence of the public stance he has adopted. In a letter to other members of the committee, he spoke of the “totalitarian vision of the greens”, comparing them to “a fundamentalist sect”.

During a public meeting in June attended by local councillors from the Nord-Cotentin region in which La Hague is situated, he used conclusions based on a model produced by Cogema, the contractor that operates the reprocessing plant, to argue that the epidemiological risk around the plant was minimal. He challenged the quality of Viel's research, but said Viel had been a victim of an “anglophone lobby” which “controls scientific publications”.

Viel says that he does not doubt the intellectual honesty of Souleau, but argues that he has “confused divergences of opinion with strong pressures, which has upset him and pushed him off course”. Viel points out that his research was justified by epidemiological analyses carried out in the United Kingdom in 1984 around the reprocessing facilities at Sellafield and Dounreay. It was therefore logical to carry out a similar study around the French plant.

This view is shared by Sugier, who points out that Viel has not reached any definitive conclusion and that he was merely putting forward a hypothesis on how the leukaemias might be linked to the nuclear activities.

Sugier says it is important to verify both Viel's results and his hypothesis. The real problem appears to be the nature of the data, which are based on the medical registers of the region. These registers are the property of individual doctors, describing how an illness spreads. There are relatively few of them, and they frequently lack rigour in the recording of the data.

The major effort now is to focus on these data and on calculations of dosage based on them. This has the support of Bernard Cazeneuve, parliamentary representative for Cherbourg and chair of a special commission on information about La Hague, which is drafting a bill to be presented to parliament in the autumn on health monitoring in France.