RE: LNT

["Jim Muckerheide" <jmuckerheide@cnts.wpi.edu>]

Note that Luckey's literature shows evidence for benefit 106 years ago!

:-)  Or the U-ore or Ra-ore pads from the '20s-'30s, or as recent as the

'60s. See Paul Frames "quack cures' page at:

http://www.orau.com/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm 

 

In the '20s low dose radiation (to a few hundred rad) stopped gangrene

in its tracks, virtually eliminating amputations and death when not

advanced to terminal conditions.

 

Regards, Jim

=========



	-----Original Message----- 

	From: hflong@postoffice.pacbell.net 

	Sent: Tue 15-Jan-02 1:42 PM 

	To: RuthWeiner@AOL.COM 

	Cc: lescrable@HOTMAIL.COM; radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu 

	Subject: Re: LNT

	

	

	"-hormetic range usually <10mSv/d or <50cSv acute exposure for

mammals-." 

	TD Luckey Radiation Hormesis CRC Press, 1990 p42. 



	Thus up to half the dose giving symptoms, there was evidence for

benefit 12 years ago. Cameron proposes that we enable deprived areas to

supplement radiation, at least up to the mountain state background, like

the nuclear shipyard workers with less cancer (doubling gulf coast

background). 



	How about offering 10 x usual US background radiation, like

those sections of Ramisar, Iran with best lymphocyte activation? Of

course accidental overdose must be carefully avoided, as it is in spent

fuel transit in England. 



	Howard Long 



	RuthWeiner@AOL.COM wrote: 



		At least for now I would go with the HPS statement that

at less than 1 rem/year (I am not sure of this number)  the cancer risk

should be treated as a distribution whose lower end is zero (those are

not the exact words -- I am paraphrasing from memory). 



		What strikes me as ridiculous is multplying a population

dose of, say, 15 mrem/year (the EPA air standard) by 0.0005 and saying

that an individual exposed to this has one chance in 100,000 (it's

actually 7.5E-6) of a "latent cancer fatality" from that exposure.  Even

worse, that in an urban population of a million persons with an average

exposure of 15 mrem, there will be 7.5 "latent cancer fatalities"

attributable to that exposure.  It's the blind application of a linear

extrapolation to zero that is simplistic and I think misleading. 



		The literature, including Health Physics, increasingly

shows evidence of thresholds (and I am not talking about Bernie Cohen's

papers).  One recent article on the atom bomb survivors seemed to show a

threshold for cancer of 20 Gy!  I am not touting this -- I think we need

to keep studying this and come up with the same kind of completely

credible threshold that EPA has set for, for example, the common air

pollutants. 



		Ruth Weiner, Ph. D. 

		ruthweiner@aol.com