Re: "Limit to Survival - Effect of Radiation

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 10/7/02 9:04:23 AM Mountain Daylight Time, jacobusj@ors.od.nih.gov writes:



> We are becoming a society obsessed with concerns about risk and overwhelmed
>
> by data.  I think it is too easy to dismiss contradictions by say "well,
>
> this piece of data show . . ."  Yet, when I read what is written with a
>
> critical eye, like the Calabrese and Baldwin article, I may come away a
>
> different perspective.  But is it less valid?


John, I keep trying to fit common sense into this, even though "common sense" can be wrong.  But let me try:


Correlation has to be correlation, there has to be a connection between source and effect, and the connection should be at least somewhat obvious "to the naked eye" like the health effects of cigarette smoking.  If there is a claim that inhaling diesel exhaust is correlated with fatal cancers, then there should be an increase in fatal cancers proportional to the amount of diesel exhaust inhaled (and inhaled by people, not by rats or mice given excessive amounts).  After all, we've all been breaathing diesel exhaust for more than half a century.  


In the air pollution episodes in Donora, PA in 1948 and in New York in the summers of 1956 and 1957 there was a pretty good correlation between airborne sulfur dioxide and increased death rate.  This was later refined, in studies on human volunteers (I was one) to elucidate the synergistic effect of fine particulate matter.  Standards were set using these sorts of data, but at the time, the linear extrapolation to zero was not done.  The thresholds of adverse effects of these substances were recognized.


Now everybody is doing this (mindless) linear extrapolation to zero, and that is part of the problem.


The other part is:  it seems pretty hard, if not impossible, to separate the effect on increases or decreases in public radiation exposure from fluctuations in background, cosmic ray exposure, etc.  That effect can be separated for occupational exposures, perhaps, but not, it seems to me, from public exposure.  


Ruth



Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com