Editors,
Your fallout radiation mortality article shows that you are being used
to promulgate a fraud.
If the subject small fallout doses could cause adverse health effects, much
less deaths, millions of people exposed to higher background radiation doses
(e.g., more than 500 mrem per year) would have higher mortality than in the
millions of people exposed to low background radiation (e.g., less than 100 mrem
per year.) Actual data show, if anything, the opposite results. Also,
hundreds of millions of people that have had diagnostic, and some moderate
levels of therapeutic, radiation would have excess mortality. This is not
true, even though it is true that people exposed to high doses have adverse
effects and excess deaths.
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation
(UNSCEAR) has had to report that there are no deaths in the public even from the
Chernobyl accident, though the surrounding population was not evacuated. Now, 16
years later, there is only a very small increase in the number of thyroid
cancers primarily in persons who were children less than about 7 years old at
the time of the accident, with no related mortality reported. This was confirmed
in a June 2001 meeting that included the World Health Organization (WHO) and the
affected countries. Recently, the UNSCEAR, WHO conclusions were confirmed in a
report including the UN Childrens Fund and UN Development Program.
Radiation is natural, and more ubiquitous to life than sunlight or water.
When natural background radiation is suppressed, organisms show adverse effects.
Supplemental radiation is beneficial, like a grow light to plants. For thousands
of years people have found high radiation areas to contribute to good health and
to cure many physiological conditions, and infectious and inflammatory
diseases. This stimulating effect is also applied to prevent and cure some
cancers.
The cellular machinery of life on earth developed when the radiation was
much higher than as it is now. Uranium 238 has a half-life about the age of
the earth, 4.5 billion years. There was twice as much, along with all of its
decay products, including radium, radon, etc. when life evolved. Uranium 235 has
a 700 million year half life, so there was 6-8 times as much. Potassium 40, a
radioactive component of this critical element in cellular functioning, has a
1.3 billion year half-life, providing a radiation dose about 3 times the 20-40
mrem per year we receive from potassium in our bodies. When the small
radioactive component of natural potassium was removed from natural potassium,
cells and organisms, and small animals, had adverse effects, including
death. When the removed potassium was replaced, or natural potassium
substituted, or exposures supplemented by other radiation sources, the cells or
organisms recovered. As a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff
member testified to an NRC Advisory Board in 1996, from his personal knowledge
of such AEC-funded research in 1958, such results were not published because it
refutes the false government premise that radiation is harmful at low doses.
The NRC, with specific direction by then current
Commissioners, refused to examine this allegation of science misconduct and
fraud, as they supported yet another report by the same people that have
misrepresented the science at the National Council of Radiation Protection and
Measurements (NCRP) to again explicitly suppress the identified evidence that
contradicts their objectives. This defrauds the public of $100s Billions in the
name of "radiation protection" for trivial doses compared to just the variation
in background radiation that can have NO public health benefit.
Regards, Jim Muckerheide
President, Radiation, Science, and Health
Co-Director, Center for Nuclear Technology and Society at WPI
See the reports at the top right of the web page:
See also our comments on the actions of the Federal agencies under
"Correspondence and Comments" in the left column