Re: TFP article in Gloucester County Times - Norm Quotes

["Brian Keele" <bdkeele@HOTMAIL.COM>]

Norm:



 



The rest of the list is correct.  The Tooth Fairy Project is a renegade group working on their own and thumbing their nose to science.  Otherwise, they would be publishing in journals that are peer reviewed by people who research causes of cancer.  If their results held up to peer-review, then there would be countless of university and government researchers all over the world trying to corroborate findings.  (Scientists are emotionally charged people to---hundreds or thousands would jump on a bandwagon to a identify a significant cause of childhood cancer).



 



The Tooth Fairy is trying to kill 2 birds with 1 stone with an apparently poor experimental design.



 



(1) The first problem is to determine if Sr-90 in baby teeth is related to cancer.  To do so, teeth need to collected from both cancer patients and non-cancer patients in the same locations.   Ideally, care should be taken to ensure that the both cancer patients and non-cancer patients had similar lifestyles, second hand smoke exposure, and diets.



 



Childhood cancers are due to multiple causes.  There will be a large number of children with normal Sr-90 levels who get cancer. 



 



In addition, not every child with elevated Sr-90 levels will get cancer.  (For example, only a portion of smokers get cancer).



 



Thus, as in every other cancer study, the difference in Sr-90 levels between the cancer and non-cancer group should be very small.   It would take a very large number of patients and controls to reliably see any difference (preferably several thousand in each group).



 



I have not seen evidence that the TFP has performed careful controlled studies to establish a link between Sr-90 in teeth and cancer incidence.



 



(2) The source of Sr-90 in teeth is a separate issue all together.  You still have a distribution of Sr-90 with geographic location regardless of the link to cancer.  There is a much larger concentration of Sr-90 in the environment from nuclear weapons testing than released from nuclear power plants.  Both sources have a very small concentration in relation to the naturally occurring radioactivity in the environment.  Weapons fallout is non-uniform across the country.  The distribution is like a blindfolded person playing darts (or myself).  To attribute an increase in Sr-90 in the environment from a specific power plant would take careful consideration of all pathways both upwind and downwind of a localized source.  



 



I have not seen evidence that the TFP has methodically established a link between Sr-90 in teeth and nuclear power plants. 



 



Brian



 





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