Re: Article on Contaminated NIH Researcher

[mcnaught@Lanl.GOV (Mike McNaughton)]

> An associate professor of radiation health sciences at Johns Hopkins
>School of Public Health is quoted as saying, "We assume that no dose, no
>matter how small, is safe.  And for something like childhood leukemia, we
>assume that there is a risk, no matter what the dose." (Apparently a firm
>believer in the linear, no threshold model.)

I think that the above quotation is a statement of "assumption", not
"belief".  I think if we are going to make progress on issues such as this,
we should make an effort to be scrupulously fair ourselves.  I, also, make
"assumptions" in order to teach ALARA, but I separate these from "beliefs".
To be even more scrupulously fair, a non-linear model without threshold
would lead to the same assumptions.

mcnaught@LANL.GOV