Re: Only Comment Re Electro Met Production: Bury the hatchet

[BLHamrick@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 6/4/2003 3:21:47 PM Pacific Standard Time, lists@richardhess.com writes:


> I will now go away and shut up on this.



Please don't.  You are a voice of sanity here.


No offense to L.H. Ricciuti or Janet Westbrook, but things do seem a bit contentious, and maybe working together on sorting this out would result in a truth that is yet more objectively justifiable than the public currently perceives it receives from the government, whatever that truth might be.


I admit I am not inclined to be impressed by Ricciuti's protestation that one should be able to take the word of a US Senator, a hospital president, a Mayo trained cardiologist and the owner of GEICO Insurance.  Having dealt with elected officials on similar issues involving radiation and its health effects over the last few years in California, I would have to say that most are not only simply uninformed in many critical matters affecting these issues, but that some have a distinct propensity to deny any professional assistance or scientific advice whatsoever if it conflicts with their preset agenda.  I.e., some have been distinctly inclined to not allow the facts to interfere with their program.


With respect to the hospital president, cardiologist and insurance CEO, I think that in any substantive argument over technical issues one can bring to the table self-proclaimed "experts," or "experts" with a record of significant credentials that will, for one reason or another, ignore mainstream science, and argue things that broach illogic.  In any highly technical field, the public will generally not be able to readily discern the chaff from the wheat in these arguments.  It is, for this reason, that it is important to examine and give significant weight to the views of the mainstream.


While everyone who is a scientist should recognize that there will be the occasional genius that bucks the trends and breaks new ground, it is foolhardy (in my opinion) to assume that every 

maverick that comes along is such a person, especially when the matters in question affect major public policies.  If the U.S. or the individual States were to change direction at the whim of every iconoclastic intellectual that came along, the society would grind to the halt, much like the automatic transmission in a car shifted from reverse to forward and back in rapid succession.


Lastly, I would like to respond to L.H. Ricciuti's comment "Sooo--according to the above logic string, then I can conclude that this professional bulletin board known as RADSAFE --supports wholly, solely, only and to the man and or woman, that there are no deleterious health effects from exposures to long term low level radiation exposures."


I don't think anyone here said anything even close to this.  I think what has been said in this discourse, or in others in the archives, is that the professionals do not know if there is harm from long term exposure to low level radiation, and this position is supported by the weight of the scientific evidence.  Whether, as a matter of public policy, it is then more conservative to assume there is harm, as the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) theory does, or to assume some threshold below which there is no harm or harm is negligible, or to assume some potential benefit from very low chronic levels of exposure (similar to our necessary ingestion of iron, zinc, or calcium) is up for grabs.


The trap we (the government and the public) have found ourselves in is that having asserted that using the LNT is conservative, we have focused solely on protecting against potential harms from a single source (i.e., radiation exposure), and ignored the myriad of potential harms from discouraging the use of radioactive materials (e.g., limiting research in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and genesis, research in metabolic and genetic disorders, among others), and the enormous costs associated with regulating extremely low levels of these contaminants (resulting in, e.g., jobs lost, or dollars lost that could have been expended on more immediate health concerns such as indigent healthcare in lieu of expensive federally or state funded cleanup or cleanup oversight efforts).  


Once again, I would like to recommend U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's book, "Breaking the Vicious Circle:  Toward Effective Risk Regulation."  (I think Richard has already given it a try and I haven't heard any negative reviews yet.)  I think it contains invaluable information for anyone concerned with risk assessment and risk management, be they the lay public, elected or appointed officials, or anyone else involved in activities related to risk regulation.


Barbara L. Hamrick