[ RadSafe ] DU & health

[Dan W McCarn]

Dear Joel: Just a word of advice:

Never, never discount FEAR as a real cause for ailments. The results of
Chernobyl clearly showed that fear / stress was a very real cause and should
not be discounted: The largest difference between the folks that were moved
away from the exclusion zone and those remaining was stress-related
diseases. And guess what?  The group that was moved away and received the
lower total dose have problems to this very day!

This also occurs in the Navajo population as increased risk factors compared
to the rest of New Mexico.

For the population under stress: increased incidence of the following
diseases (compared to those who remained) in order of significance:
1) Death by suicide
2) Death by acute / chronic alcoholism /drug abuse
3) Increased rate of diabetes
4) Increased rate of heart disease
5) Increase rate of stroke

The loss of life expectancy was about 7 years compared to the group who
remained behind.

Fear / stress related issues can be addressed by informing the population of
the actual risks and training risk mediators.  This is why your personnel
should be trained immediately else you might find yourself or your
organization at risk for law suites.

These were results quoted by my old IAEA boss:
Prof. A. Nechaev, St. Petersburg Inst. Of Technology
>From a Russian paper and correlate exactly with health statistics of the
Navajo population in New Mexico.

Dan ii

Dan W. McCarn

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On Behalf
Of Cehn at aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 20:05
To: radsafe at radlab.nl
Subject: [ RadSafe ] DU & health

I've been skimming the posts on DU and health.  Mostly sound &  fury.  But I

have to report:  we have a mostly foreign crew  working overseas on a DU
job; 
with little no prior rad experience.  They  attribute every little ache and 
pain to the DU.  If they can think of it,  DU is the culprit.  Risk scholars

talk about "availability bias."  A  recent (available) piece of information
gets 
over-emphasized, at the expense of  better information.  Another example of 
pollutant du jour.  

Joel I. Cehn, CHP
_joelc at alum.wpi.edu_ (mailto:joelc at alum.wpi.edu) 
 

_______________________________________________
You are currently subscribed to the RadSafe mailing list

Before posting a message to RadSafe be sure to have read and understood the
RadSafe rules. These can be found at:
http://radlab.nl/radsafe/radsaferules.html

For information on how to subscribe or unsubscribe and other settings visit:
http://radlab.nl/radsafe/