Re: Critics Allege Infant Mortality Rate

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

>This is probably a dumb question, but how would the differences
> in dose estimates from the marginal variations reported compare with the
>diferrences in natural doses due to geography. In other words, if one
>assumed the effect to be true what would it predict for say an increase in
>infant health effects for the folks in Denver?

Actually, I believe this to be the ultimate "sanity check" question to be
answered - do the claims of radiation-caused harm fit within common human
experience, i.e, is the claim even possible?

Example: the Tooth Fairy project claims to have found Sr-90 in baby teeth in
the amounts of 1-17 pCi/g of calcium and an associated (detectable) increase
in childhood cancer. If such Sr-90 concentrations are, on average for the
test, an acceptably representative sample of Sr-90 in the body of a child,
the dose over the early years of life would be a few mrem at most (lifetime
dose commitment is irrelevent in this case because the study claims the
effects have been expressed at an early age, so we're dealing with exposure
that could only have occurred over a period of just a few years).

HOWEVER, if a dose of 1-2 mrem above the natural background of the eastern
US can cause a detectable outbreak of cancer in children, then Colorado
would be uninhabitable! And yet the cancer rate in Colorado is LOWER than
the national average despite the higher than average dose from natural
background. The study's claims fail the "sanity check."

Likewise, if the levels of Sr-90 detected by the study are in the same
region as observed in the heyday of atmospheric weapons tests, as the study
claims, then the entire country must have been awash in these childhood
cancers in that same time period, but it wasn't. The study fails another
sanity check.

Now I have a question: the reason the study used baby teeth was the chemical
characteristic of strontium that leads to finding it anywhere one finds
calcium, which is a reasonable approach. But the same can be said for
potassium, can it not? Has anyone done a technical examination of the
analytical methods used by the Tooth Fairy project to see if they simply
have found K-40 and assumed it was Sr-90? (I may be displaying my ignorance
of these analytical methods, and if so, I apologize in advance for the use
of bandwidth.)
============================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: William Prestwich <prestwic@mcmail.cis.McMaster.CA>
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 27, 2000 6:21 AM
Subject: Re: Critics Allege Infant Mortality Rate


>Bill Prestwich
>McMaster University
>Hamilton, Ontario
>
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