Re: A Reporter Questions Rokke

[BLHamrick@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 7/15/2003 9:14:21 AM Pacific Standard Time, 

stanford@stanforddosimetry.com writes:



> The first impulse on reading this stuff is to laugh.  "Where do I begin?"   

> I have tried to reason with him (and his significant audience on his cc 

> list) but he will not respond, no references.  So the more you question him, the 

> more opportunity he has to spout off.  Rediculous as his charges appear to 

> us, he has a very wide and growing audience of scared believers.  I have 

> challenged him time and again when he makes misleading remarks within my area of 

> expertise, but I cannot challenge him on the medical records.  They have become 

> a stronger and stronger part of his ranting.



This is precisely the problem people in California have faced with certain 

avowed anti-nuclear activists.  They produce an enormous amount of 

misinformation, disseminate it in the press, and to the legislators and their staff, and 

the agencies sit back, and pretend it is not their problem, or make feeble 

attempts at defense, only when pressed, and, in my opinion, only to the extent they 

do not offend those that might one day, theoretically, be political allies.



The gross disinformation presented by many activist groups with respect to 

the health effects of radiation is a public health problem, and all public 

agencies with responsibility for the control of radiation or mitigation of serious 

events involving radiation  (i.e., the NRC, DOE, EPA, VA, FDA, FEMA, and their 

State counterparts) should be publicly countering the many distortions of 

fact that appear almost daily in one or another public fora across the country.



It is time to educate the public, legislators, and media to distinguish the 

"good" science from the "bad" (Hint:  Start by actually verifying a few claimed 

credentials).  It is time to educate the public, legislators, and media on 

cancer incidence and cancer clusters (Hint:  Erin Brockovich-style 

"epidemiology" proves nothing more than we will all eventually die of something).  It is 

time to educate the public, legislators, and media on the facts about 

cost-benefit analyses (Hint:  We place a dollar amount on human lives every minute of 

the day - we cannot spend an infinite amount of money on each and every 

individual - there's nothing even remotely immoral about this approach to 

resource-balancing).



The idea that all stakeholders should have an opportunity to bring their 

concerns to the table is commendable, but the idea that each stakeholder's 

statements should have equal weight in a highly-technical public debate is foolhardy. 

 No matter your education or station in life, it should not be that difficult 

to conceive that some persons may have more comprehensive and reliable 

information on an inherently difficult subject (e.g., brain surgery, cosmology, 

microbiology or radiation physics) than others.  Equality under the law does not 

guarantee validity under the law.  The earth isn't flat.  It's just not.  For a 

society to continue functioning, a few lines have to be drawn.  We have to at 

least agree upon a reasonable standard for defining an objective reality.  It 

is, in my opinion, the job of the public agencies with appropriate expertise 

to actively participate in revealing that reality to the public.



Right now, the majority of the public is hearing only an extremist-minority 

opinion on the health effects of radiation exposure, because it is this opinion 

that is on local news shows and in local papers.  In my opinion, when the 

public agencies with the proper expertise to address these issues, and counter 

the misinformation, stand by, hoping the issue will die away, rather than taking 

on the difficult task of countering these campaigns, they are actively 

abdicating their responsibility to the public.



Barbara L. Hamrick