Re: Rumbles

[JMUCKERHEIDE@delphi.com]

"Free Spirit" writes:
> 
> <JimM>
> >I think you're right! Its finally the sound of digging in of heels as the
> >obvious waste of massive national resources in the name of environmental
> >protection, and more importantly public health and safety! especially while
> >not funding many very important environmental and public health and safety
> >matters that really cause human injury and disease, 
>
>         Well, not really. 

No? We spend $10s Billions/yr to protect people from levels of radiation that
have no incremental health effects. Health effects data shows no adverse
effects to 10s of rem. Where does "not really" come from? 

>         However the only organization that deliberately
>         exposed many citizens to large scale levels of radiation seems to
>         be the Government, in the name of "seeing how quickly soldiers can
>         recover from a tactical Nuke," etc.

I expect to this kind of uninformed statement on talk.environment, etc., not
the health physics mail list. Without taking the time to type all the detail,
Nobel Laureate Dr. Rosalyn Yalow (Physiology or Medicine, 1977) reports on the 
report by the Medical Followup Agency of the National Research Council,
National Academy of Sciences, that examined the entire 46,186 cohort of US
"atomic veterans" that reported zero increase in leukemia or other cancers.
Leukemia was the cancer that was said to have occurred in Operation Smokey
veterans, which found that 10 leukemias in 3200 participants where the SMR is
3.97. First, only 1 of the 10 had a exposure greater than 3 rem! Second,
Operation Greenhouse, 1951, had almost 3000 participants, an SMR of 4.43, with 
only 1 leukemia. Both of these are examples of normal statistical variations
in small group numbers! The independent dose reconstruction effort by the
National Research Council confirmed that the dose estimates were, if anything, 
overestimates, not underestimates, so the Smoky participants with leukemia all 
had <<3 rem, proving no association since much more extensive data at much
higher doses reported by Dr. Yalow (at levels of medical exposures,
radiologists, the Japanese, natural background, etc) show no increased
leukemia at 10s of rem. 
> 
>         It's not that I'm against working to reduce exposure to radiation,
>         it's just that I don't like having the fox in charge of protecting
>         the henhouse.
> 
This doesn't seem to relate to anything said, but just a flippant negative
statement about a subject that the (unidentified) writer proves to be
grotesquely uninformed about. 

The writer is invited to take these comments and views to a more suitable,
non-technical, forum. 

Thanks.

Regards, Jim Muckerheide