RE: "The Bell Tolls for LNT"

["Stabin, Michael" <michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu>]

Franz wrote:

>Radiation Protection is in fact politics and not science.



This is not how I normally express it. If we recall the history of our regulatory process, for many decades we were entirely guided by the same scientific and advisory bodies that we have now, namely the ICRP and NCRP, in limiting doses to workers and the public. When the time came to produce a uniform set of national regulations (because those wacky folks out in California decided to make up their own state regs), these regulations were and still are guided by scientific input where possible. Lauri Taylor truly lamented the idea that we would move away from a purely scientific basis to one in which political concerns would come into play, but it was inevitable, so the best scientific minds (namely the ICRP) guided the process. 



At that time, and still in this time, we are unsure of what is going on at low doses and dose rates, so we made a *policy* decision, which is pretty reasonable. As John says, this is not the way to do good science (send any article you wish to a good journal in which you made measurements between certain limits and then extrapolated beyond the bounds of the data to infer values in other regions, and it should be rejected), but it is necessary for policymaking. Of course as regulations and regulatory agencies have increased, there are more political issues in the mix, and some arguably bad, bad science at times, but overall things are basically working. I agree that ridiculous amounts of resources are sometimes expended chasing miniscule doses does not make for sound overall US public policy on health and safety.



I have stated before and will state again that I disagree strongly with the assertions by some of political bias among members of the ICRP and other bodies. I am also sickened by the abuse of the LNT by political opportunists, projecting thousands of cancer deaths across big populations from many people receiving low doses, scaring people for no good reason, including recent examples in the medical literature. 



We are all trying honestly to sort out what is true at low levels, between evidence for hormesis, thresholds, gene damage and repair, bystander effects and cellular signaling, etc. While we sort things out, the established policy is the one to rely upon. "The bell tolls" was not a very good critical assessment of the situation, in my opinion, just essentially an op-ed piece by someone who has staked out an opinion before all of the scientific data are in. 





Mike



Michael G. Stabin, PhD, CHP

Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences 

Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences 

Vanderbilt University 

1161 21st Avenue South

Nashville, TN 37232-2675 

Phone (615) 343-0068

Fax   (615) 322-3764

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e-mail     michael.g.stabin@vanderbilt.edu 

internet   www.doseinfo-radar.com



 

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