Re: Rumbles

[Free Spirit <FRANK@rover.bsd.uchicago.edu>]

To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>

"Free Spirit" writes:
> 
>         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.

	I don't disagree with the the later findings that incidences of
	Cancer were near zero, and that the effects of the exposure were
	minimal, (except for induced phobias and much media hyperbole.)
	But actions such as these have contributed greatly to the general
	phobia of radiation present today. 

	Recently there have also been relevations about various radiation
	experiments carried out on unknowing subjects at various universities.

	Even though any radiation effects from these experiments also turn
	out to be minimal, in all these cases, it matters not that the final
	effect of the experiments were not harmful. What matters is that the
	experiments were carried out without informed consent.

	In the case of the medical/research exposures, it would only take a
	few people to perform these experiments. In the case of the government,
	it took a whole bunch.