RE: Hormesis? / DNA repair...

["Ted Rockwell" <tedrock@cpcug.org>]

Bjorn:

Thanks for your intelligent input.  What we in RSH are calling for is just
such a discussion.  The policy-makers and official advisors have doggedly
refused to do so.  They just pretend these reports don't exist, or that they
don't say what they do, or that they have vague, unstated flaws that make
them invalid.  It is hard not to doubt their sincerity under such
circumstances.

We all know how to do such critiques.  Such stalwart LNT advocates as Dan
Strom have done the job beautifully on papers by Sternglass, Gofman and
Wing.  They tackled explicit presumptions and inferences in the papers, and
showed why they were not legitimate.  That's what we need to do for those
reports that so clearly claim to have made the case for hormesis.

There is, of course, no decent theoretical or empirical basis that "proves,
or even supports" the use of LNT at low levels.  Advocates merely say you
can't exclude the possibility that it might be right, and they claim it is
conservative.  That doesn't set a very high standard for any competing
model.

Again thanks.

Ted Rockwell




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