Re: Uranium Workers Used in Experiments

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 12:36 PM 2/9/00 -0600, you wrote:

>Making Tobacco Inc pay for
>this is, imho, the nanny state run amok.

During the 25 years that I smoked, I most certainly can be described as the
one who made the decision to smoke. No argument. And for all of those
years, I certainly did understand that there was a health risk from
smoking. Again, no argument. But during those years I certainly was NOT
aware that the nicotine levels were being enhanced during manufacture to
"improve" the product's addictive properties to keep the customer hooked. I
happened by dumb luck to find a method to quit that circumvented the
boosted nicotine - I switched (exclusively) to a pipe for a number of
years, and pipe tobacco wasn't enhanced in nicotine, so when I quit the
pipe it wasn't terribly difficult. No good planning involved, just luck. It
was years later that it became known that the industry manipulated nicotine
levels to increase addiction.

The tobacco industry took actions to addict customers to a product that
they knew would harm the health of the customer, collected their profits,
and left the customer, insurance companies, and various governments to foot
the medical costs they knew were inevitable. I find that behavior
unacceptable; recovering medical costs from an industry that preyed on the
public isn't my idea of a "nanny state run amok."

>OTOH, automotive recalls almost always involve a
>manufacturing or design defect that even the
>most astute driver could not a priori know about.

You missed the point. The auto manufacturers were publicly acknowledging a
problem and taking action based on it. That ISN'T the case with low dose
radiation exposure. There is presently a movement to compensate workers for
low dose exposure - this will be perceived as a public acknowledgement of a
problem caused by those low doses, and there's no evidence to demonstrate
that such is the case.

>> How do you think the AMA will deal with this? If this low dose compensation
>> idea survives, it seems inevitable that significant numbers of people will
>> begin to refuse xrays and other medical procedures because "deadly
>> radiation" is involved, and that's a phenomenon that could easily snowball
>> into a nationwide epidemic. 
>
>I look at it differently.  If this comes to pass, it will be natural
>selection at its finest.
>
>Yeah, that's radical but I'm just a bit weary of coddling the
>stupid.

Really? You'd stand by watching a small group misrepresent the dangers of
radiation, take no action to correct the misinformation, and blame the
public when they react normally to the misinformation?

Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
(650) 926-3793

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