§7384n Exposure in the performance of duty

Summary

Workers who handled beryllium are treated as having been exposed on the job unless strong evidence shows otherwise. That applies if they worked at a Department of Energy (DOE) site or were at a DOE or beryllium-vendor site because of work for the U.S. government, a vendor, or a DOE contractor. People with certain cancers are treated as having gotten the cancer from work if the cancer is found to be at least as likely as not linked to the named facility, using rules the President must write after technical review by the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. Those rules must use the worker’s radiation dose and the upper 99 percent confidence interval of the probability-of-causation tables in section 7(b) of the Orphan Drug Act, include the dose-estimate methods required below, and consider cancer type, smoking, and other factors. For atomic-weapons workers, certain radiation sources and any indistinguishable doses count toward the total. The President must pick a non-DOE agency to make methods for estimating doses when monitoring is missing or inadequate, and the Advisory Board must review and check those methods. The Energy Secretary must give each affected worker their dose estimates for each job, and HHS and DOE must share the dose methods and data with researchers and the public while protecting private medical records.