Re: Deaths from fossil fuel burning air pollution

["Jerry Cohen" <jjcohen@prodigy.net>]

Terms such as (deaths/person-Sv), or (deaths/ ton of "pollution") have
always bothered me!
 Deaths, as opposed to what? Eternal life?
Sooner or later everybody dies, whether  they they were exposed to
"pollution" or not. Wouldn't it be more rational to expess the potential
effect of harmful exposures in terms of reduction in life-expectancy.
Semantics is important! For example, 100 additional deaths/yr nationally can
be translated into an average  reduction of just a few seconds from an
anticipated 70 yr lifespan.  I guess the terms one chooses to apply  depend
on the degree of apprehernsion one wishes to cause.
While I am ranting, just what do we mean by "pollution". I define pollution
as  "anything you release to the environment that I don't like". Anybody got
a problem with that?      jjcohen@prodigy.net


at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html

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