Re: [riskanal] Re: Fw: Colorado cancer

[Muckerheide <muckerheide@MEDIAONE.NET>]

Hi Herb, 



You'll appreciate the following excerpts from Norm's 1973 Argonne Report.

http://cnts.wpi.edu/rsh/Data_Docs/1-2/6/2/12628fr73.html



Note, this was initiated in response to the Calvert Cliffs decision on poor

AEC EISs. So it was undertaken vy the licensing guys - would never have been

undertaken by the rad research people who would have known what to expect!

:-)



Since national rad data was not good at the time (he used the Oakley '72

report done for EPA on state-average rad data, with 5 mrem increments, but

his analysis was superlative, always trying/"expecting" to see the increase

as a function dose, eventually pushing into Monte Carlo analysis. It's a

great read!  Unique for a national lab report :-)



Of course, Norm expected the project to continue to the next phase, to get

the rad data by county needed to more accurately match with the cancer data

by county. On seeing the results, AEC immediately terminated the program!

Norm only got the results pub'd, in a very limited way, by going to the 1976

IAEA conference on the health effects of background radiation. Then BEIR III

unceremoniously rejected it (despite Harald Rossi's initiatives in that

report, but his focus was on trashing the biophysics nonsense used to

justify the LNT, not epidemiology, although he ended making his case more on

epidemiology than biology, which is what biology/medical researchers do!)

and UNSCEAR (Pochin) wouldn't even allow a ref to it. Truly the "LNT-mafia"

at work! :-)



I can make copies of the full report for anyone who wants to read it all -

it's small.



Norm's untimely death was a great loss. He was only 56. He had the potential

to have made the difference. Most people who knew what he did about the rad

research programs simply decided to move on, like Jake Spalding, e.g.:

http://cnts.wpi.edu/rsh/Data_Docs/1-3/1/Rev%202%2013122Spal.html

[Note that this report is on the LANL web site as a pdf file - just search

by report number!]



and Hugh Henry, who was at ORNL when he reviewed "all the low dose radiation

research results" in a paper in JAMA 1961, e.g.:

http://cnts.wpi.edu/rsh/Data_Docs/1-3/1/13110he61.html

for his mammal data. There's more in other sections of the Data Document.

(The JAMA editor chose to run despite being pushed to not accept it - and

Art Upton at the time tried to keep it from being submitted - as chairman of

the NSWS, BEIR V,  and now NCRP-136, he has spent more than 40 years

suppressing the data. Including his own data as shown in Henry's paper :-)

Same as Johnson did in 1936 in the first Nat Res Council report on the

"lack" of health benefits from radiation, while thousand of Drs. were using

low doses to cure infections, inflammations, cancer, etc. :-(



The winner is the first to identify the number of separate sections by Henry

in the Data Document!  :-)



Regards, Jim

==========



A historical footnote to the controversy about the high-background radiation

states having low cancer rates:



 The effect was first noticed by a scientist from Argonne National

Laboratory about three decades ago. His name was Frigerio, and he has since

passed away. Rather than concentrate on one or two examples or states

(Colorado and Utah in the correspondence so far), he did a statistical

analysis of all the fifty states and came to the conclusion that, at a

minimum, hgih background radiation (at least at the levels found in the US)

did not affect cancer rates upward. I am not sure if he adjusted for smoking

rates and other factors, although I believe that this has been done in

subsequent studies.









Herbert Inhaber, Ph.D.

President 

Risk Concepts 

3920 Mohigan Way 

Las Vegas Nevada 89119

Phone: 702-894-9095

Fax: 702-894-9095 

e-Mail: hinhaber@hotmail.com

 

>From: "dkosloff1" 

>Reply-To: "dkosloff1"

>To: "Mailing List for Risk Professionals"

>Subject: [riskanal] Re: Fw: Colorado cancer

>Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001 08:35:32 -0500

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>How do we know the majority of people in Colorado came from somewhere else?

>What if they came from some other nearby state with similar high background

>radiation? What if they came to Colorado at age ten and lived there for the

>next 40 years? Why would people in Colorado have a different age

>distrubution than the rest of the U.S? Why do the other high background

>radiation states also have low cancer rates? Is the state with the lowest

>cancer rate next to Colorado? I believe it is Utah, which has some areas

>with high arsenic levels in drinking water and supposedly high radiation

>from bomb testin. People who live in Utah receive a mean annual dose of 155

>mrem per year compared to 225 for Colorado and a US mean of 105 mrem. Texas

>and Louisiana have the lowest mean exposure of 75 mrem per year.

> 

>If one is going to claim that facts have been "stomped on", shouldn't some

>specific evidence be presented?

> 

>Don Kosloff, dkosloff1@msn.com

>2910 Main Street, Perry Ohio 44081

> 

>----- Original Message -----

>From: "S. Weldert"

>To: "Mailing List for Risk Professionals"

>Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 7:54 AM

>Subject: [riskanal] Re: Fw: Colorado cancer

> 

>SNIP 

> > It appears that quite a few facts were stomped on

> > to make the point. For instance, where did the

> > cancer mortality come from? Was it age

> > adjusted????? The majority of the population of

> > Colorado is not from there. Does the first lowest

> > cancer mortality rate state also have high

> > background radiation? Is there any significant

> > relationship between the statistic cited and

> > background radiation in all 50 states?

> 

> 

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