RE: Rosalie Bertell

["Heinmiller, Bruce" <heinmillerb@aecl.ca>]

One of Dr. Bertell's more incredible pronouncements was a statement
appearing on a public-broadcaster-produced program called The Nature of
Things, the statement being that at least 50 000 excess deaths in 1980 were
attributable to the TMI accident in 1979.

But what followed on this clearly biased program were two items relevant to
this statement that were arguably worse.  First, the program presenter (an
environmental activist) stated, with regard to Dr. Bertell's methods: "But
these are the same types of statistical techniques used to explore the
relationship between smoking and lung cancer."  Now, I had read the U.S.
Surgeon General's report which was quite clear in the techniques used to
explore the smoking-cancer relationship.  It outlined them in careful detail
and it critically assessed the relationship using Hill's criteria.

The second indiscretion by the program presenter (after previously having
given misleading credibility to Dr. Bertell's statement) was advocating
weather stripping and caulking for houses to reduce ventilation heat loss
(and our reliance on nuclear power) - this without the word radon ever being
mentioned.

A letter was submitted to the Canadian broadcast regulator pointing out that
the false or misleading statements made by the presenter on the program
violated the television broadcasting regulations.  The response from the
regulator was that these regulations, which prohibit the broadcast of false
or misleading news, do not apply to a program like The Nature of Things.
Our public broadcaster has also taken a position, with regard to their own
journalistic policy, that is consistent with that of the broadcast
regulator.  They consider this type of programming "arts and entertainment"
so that their journalistic policy (which would otherwise also be clearly
violated) does not apply.

Bruce Heinmiller CHP
heinmillerb@aecl.ca

> ----------
> From: 	Franta, Jaroslav[SMTP:frantaj@aecl.ca]
> Reply To: 	radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu
> Sent: 	Monday, July 17, 2000 6:20 PM
> To: 	Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: 	RE: Rosalie Bertell
> 
> 
> The book review by A. Cottrell  of Bertell's NO IMMEDIATE DANGER (
> "Between
> fact and passion," NATURE, Vol. 316, p. 583, 15 Aug. 1985 ) called her
> work
> an unscientific tirade and manifesto, written "with the set mind of the
> zealot... too obsessive to be convincing." On page 47 of her book Bertell
> hints at how one may arrive at the kind of bizarre conclusions she does :
> "data accumulated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not give the desired
> answers."
> 
> In a videotaped seminar at Concordia University (Montreal) on 12 March
> 1986,
> Bertell showed a color slide of our blue planet Earth as photographed by a
> spacecraft "in 1972," and commented in all seriousness that "we can't get
> one [photograph] like that anymore because the Earth today is
> brown-looking"
> (and the audience seems to have bought it, like they do all her anti-nuke
> stuff).
> 
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