DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Radiation not as harmful as publicized?

Could there be any truth to this? Yes, I know the source will turn some stomachs here, but the article is largely apolitical.....and I wouldn't reference this site in a political discussion.

A GLOWING REPORT ON RADIATION
March 16, 2011

With the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami that have devastated Japan, the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer.

This only seems counterintuitive because of media hysteria for the past 20 years trying to convince Americans that radiation at any dose is bad. There is, however, burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine.

As The New York Times science section reported in 2001, an increasing number of scientists believe that at some level -- much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government -- radiation is good for you. "They theorize," the Times said, that "these doses protect against cancer by activating cells' natural defense mechanisms."

Among the studies mentioned by the Times was one in Canada finding that tuberculosis patients subjected to multiple chest X-rays had much lower rates of breast cancer than the general population.

And there are lots more!

A $10 million Department of Energy study from 1991 examined 10 years of epidemiological research by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on 700,000 shipyard workers, some of whom had been exposed to 10 times more radiation than the others from their work on the ships' nuclear reactors. The workers exposed to excess radiation had a 24 percent lower death rate and a 25 percent lower cancer mortality than the non-irradiated workers.

Isn't that just incredible? I mean, that the Department of Energy spent $10 million doing something useful? Amazing, right?

In 1983, a series of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed with massive amounts of cobalt 60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years, the buildings' 10,000 occupants developed only five cases of cancer. The cancer rate for the same age group in the general Taiwanese population over that time period predicted 170 cancers.

The people in those buildings had been exposed to radiation nearly five times the maximum "safe" level according to the U.S. government. But they ended up with a cancer rate 96 percent lower than the general population.

Bernard L. Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, compared radon exposure and lung cancer rates in 1,729 counties covering 90 percent of the U.S. population. His study in the 1990s found far fewer cases of lung cancer in those counties with the highest amounts of radon -- a correlation that could not be explained by smoking rates.

Tom Bethell, author of the The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science has been writing for years about the beneficial effects of some radiation, or "hormesis." A few years ago, he reported on a group of scientists who concluded their conference on hormesis at the University of Massachusetts by repairing to a spa in Boulder, Mont., specifically in order to expose themselves to excess radiation.

At the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Boulder, people pay $5 to descend 85 feet into an old mining pit to be irradiated with more than 400 times the EPA-recommended level of radon. In the summer, 50 people a day visit the mine hoping for relief from chronic pain and autoimmune disorders.

Amazingly, even the Soviet-engineered disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 can be directly blamed for the deaths of no more than the 31 people inside the plant who died in the explosion. Although news reports generally claimed a few thousand people died as a result of Chernobyl -- far fewer than the tens of thousands initially predicted -- that hasn't been confirmed by studies.

Indeed, after endless investigations, including by the United Nations, Manhattan Project veteran Theodore Rockwell summarized the reports to Bethell in 2002, saying, "They have not yet reported any deaths outside of the 30 who died in the plant."

Even the thyroid cancers in people who lived near the reactor were attributed to low iodine in the Russian diet -- and consequently had no effect on the cancer rate.

Meanwhile, the animals around the Chernobyl reactor, who were not evacuated, are "thriving," according to scientists quoted in the April 28, 2002 Sunday Times (UK).

Dr. Dade W. Moeller, a radiation expert and professor emeritus at Harvard, told The New York Times that it's been hard to find excess cancers even from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly because one-third of the population will get cancer anyway. There were about 90,000 survivors of the atomic bombs in 1945 and, more than 50 years later, half of them were still alive. (Other scientists say there were 700 excess cancer deaths among the 90,000.)

Although it is hardly a settled scientific fact that excess radiation is a health benefit, there's certainly evidence that it decreases the risk of some cancers -- and there are plenty of scientists willing to say so. But Jenny McCarthy's vaccine theories get more press than Harvard physics professors' studies on the potential benefits of radiation. (And they say conservatives are anti-science!)

I guess good radiation stories are not as exciting as news anchors warning of mutant humans and scary nuclear power plants -- news anchors who, by the way, have injected small amounts of poison into their foreheads to stave off wrinkles. Which is to say: The general theory that small amounts of toxins can be healthy is widely accepted --except in the case of radiation.

Every day Americans pop multivitamins containing trace amount of zinc, magnesium, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, nickel, boron -- all poisons.

They get flu shots. They'll drink copious amounts of coffee to ingest a poison: caffeine. (Back in the '70s, Professor Cohen offered to eat as much plutonium as Ralph Nader would eat caffeine -- an offer Nader never accepted.)

But in the case of radiation, the media have Americans convinced that the minutest amount is always deadly.

Although reporters love to issue sensationalized reports about the danger from Japan's nuclear reactors, remember that, so far, thousands have died only because of Mother Nature. And the survivors may outlive all of us over here in hermetically sealed, radiation-free America.

http://www.anncoulter.com/

The source is "ann coulter"...

need I say anything more...

Post deleted by jfanent

jfan...it's "ann coulter" telling those who will believe her, that radiation is not harmful.

I guess I should mark you down as an "ann coulter" follower..that explains a lot!

ann and jfan say radiation is not harmful...

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ann and jfan say radiation is not harmful...

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There you go again. Lying and accusing me of saying something I didn't. This is becoming a habit of yours. Didn't you learn your lesson?

The 1st sentence of Jfan's post.

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Could there be any truth to this? Yes, I know the source will turn some stomachs here, but the article is largely apolitical.....and I wouldn't reference this site in a political discussion.

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I think the truth is somewhere in between. Radiation poising is real but at what point does it become dangerous? I think the media loves to scare people for ratings which makes the issue murky. We have seen the president come out and talk about the radiation reaching our west coast. I think he was forced to because of all the press about possible radiation problems.

Oh my God ...... I'm reading that article and thinking .... "Hmm, radon gas for chronic pain ...... wonder if it would help my back .....?"

Radiation is harmful but it's at high doses.... currently the radioation levels (from what I've read) in Japan are not high enough to be harmful except in the immediate area of the nuke plant... but with that said I've gotten to read several stories about how Cali is at risk for high radiation that causes leukemia and several types of cancers... I'm still trying to figure out how if the radiation levels in Japan currently are not harmful how they will cause rising radation in Cali...


I think a lot of it is scare tatics personally.

Describing Ann Coulter as apolitical? I don't know about that . . . she is a proponent of nuclear power right?

Without doing much research or fact checking it seems like she is cherry picking parts of reports however I am reading more and more articles that seem to share the same sentiment.

If anything . . . it makes me want to learn more.

thanks for the post.

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Just don't forget that nuke reactors produce waste. I would have a hard time allowing a waste dump in my backyard .. .

For me at least, this leads to something else that kind of surprised me.

Maybe it was simply from watching movies like "The China Syndrome", but somewhere along the way I was under the impression a meltdown would happen much faster.

This has gone on over a week, which gives us all some hope in any future emergencies.

I don't know, I thought it was a matter of hours, or maybe a day without cooling and it was over.

She's probably got it partly correct. While I bet she's cherry-picking a bit, but it's true people are very afraid of radiation. However, our bodies are able to handle short doses of high amounts of some types. I should reiterate that it's short amounts. Long-term exposure is where the health problems lie I think.

I think it runs parallel with this irrational fear of dirt, bacteria, etc. More and more studies are showing that it's important, at least early in life, to prime our immune systems with as much as it can handle.

j/c

Accumulative build up of radiation exposure can be a 'slow killer'.

X Rays and CAT scan machines can save our lives, but they can also add to our built up consumption and therefore build up over the coarse of ones life.

Standards are set pretty low for that reason alone.

I have personally been exposed to it in my life time in the Marines and after wards first working at Picker INT and then Phillips electronics (Alpha drive)over the past 25 years off and on.

The last time we raised all lead walls an additional two feet every where, because they found the current lead lined lab walls, insufficiently protective against reflective rays.
Hmmm.

Too many RADs/ hour and your badge tells you that you are in danger of; from a book

"Radiation syndrome, radiation toxicity, radiation illness, radiation damage, radiation sickness and excessive radiation exposure are all known facts that can make you ill or KILL YOU!"

This can lead to;

"Unexplained symptoms of fatigue, lethargy, a weakened immune system, tumors, unexplained illnesses, anemia, excessive bleeding, genetic damage, cancer, leukemia, cataracts, possibly having children with severe birth defects."

I know some will try and down play this such as they are with the milk and spinach contamination in Japan, but the facts are that any and all radiation released in our land, water or atmosphere only make this a more toxic plant for all living things.
It adds to it and anymore is Bad, Not good. Jm 2 cents

I understand radiation kills...even if slowly.




My point is "meltdown" is a slower process then I though.




Which is good.

If anyone would like to read up on what a doctor says about Ann's allegation, you can go here. These guys are professionals. The one that did the write up is an oncologist of some note, sometimes writing under the pseudonym "Orac."

Thanks for the post. Looking at those abstracts it appears that there's no evidence that lower doses of radiation are either helpful or harmful. The one test did show an increased risk for those 10-14 years of age. I wish he would have put forth the extra effort to get the actual results (he didn't want to pay the 40 dollars for one and couldn't locate the other) before posting this article. I'm also surprised that he didn't cite any studies other than the ones Coulter referenced.

jfan...it's ann coulter, telling "you" that radiation is good for you...ann coulter




Did anyone notice anything odd about this paragraph from the coulter article?


"In 1983, a series of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed with massive amounts of cobalt 60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years, the buildings' 10,000 occupants developed only five cases of cancer. The cancer rate for the same age group in the general Taiwanese population over that time period predicted 170 cancers. "


So, only 5 cases after 16 yrs....hmm..

1983 plus 16 yrs takes us to "1999"...

I wonder how many cases of cancer have occurred in the last 10 yrs or so?

jfan...it's "Ann Coulter"...telling you, radiation is good for you...

3 posts in this thread on radiation mac and not a single point yet other than you don't like Ann Coulter.

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I wish he would have put forth the extra effort to get the actual results (he didn't want to pay the 40 dollars for one and couldn't locate the other) before posting this article.

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If he were at his research institution he'd be able to probably. Unless it's an obscure journal that is.

At any rate, I think his main point was that she's taking one model of radiation exposure and applying it willy-nilly across the board for everyone. The model currently used for policy-making is the most conservative method that applies to our current body of knowledge. Basically it's to set a standard minimum that has to observed by certain companies that deal with radioactive substances and make sure that worker exposure is monitored. The model AC is referencing is less robust data-wise, but still could apply if certain aspects of current data turns out to be true. Personally, I think the idea that low-dose radiation positively affecting cellular repair mechanisms is plausible. I have to leave the proof up to the experts though.

The same thing is going on with mercury. Some people say our "daily allowance" is too low and that our bodies are perfectly capable of handling the exposure. Personally, I've never been one to eat more than three fish meals per week, so I haven't really kept up with the ongoing story.

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Cobalt 60 is a radioactive isotope that emits gamma ray radiation as it breaks down. It has a half-life of 3-5 years. That's a relatively short time.

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What I think mac is trying to say, in his normal annoying way, is that given enough time those people may still end up getting cancer. In the end, after all 10k of those people die, their cancer incidence may not be any different than normal.

More Data. Kind of puts the whole "Radiation allowances" into perspective. Totally SFW by the way. Share it with any of the unintentional fear-mongers out there

FL,

I also did a short stint at Philips as a CT Co-Op, so I was in the test bays all day and all night. I was under the impression that very little if any of the radiation of the CT made it all the way to the lead walls, then through them to me.

Those nuclear scanners, however, with the radioactive isotopes, gave us techs a much higher exposure because even though they were low dosage, the relative energy (or was it frequency) was much higher than the X-ray source, so no amount of lead walls was going to stop that radiation from getting out of the scanning room.

There is a point to this post, and I'm going to make it right now. I was taught that, for really any type of radiation, the best protection from any exposure is space/distance. Radiation traveling through any media (even air) decays rapidly as it travels away from its source. Put another way, you can protect yourself better from a specific source of radiation by taking a step away than dropping a leaded wall between you and the source.

Now, applying this to Japan's radiation leakage reaching CA... it had to travel all the way over the Pacific Ocean, so I can't help but laugh when anyone says that it will have an effect on people here on the west coast.

Also, all the reports that I've seen (and I haven't done much looking at all, just watching local news), have just talked about PROJECTED radiation travel and when it's supposed to reach our shores. I have NOT seen any measured/tested spike in radiation here in the states.

NRTU,
Don't really have time to get all scientific, but basically, the possible positive effects of limited exposure to radiation are being studied in pretty main stream venues. We have a very limited source of test groups for which an accurate dose/time can or had been recorded. This makes it very difficult to study. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of those effected were within the LD 50/30 exposure range, and it is not known exactly what areas received what specific doses for any definite period of time.

There are multiple theories on what ionizing radiation does, how it harms us and what it does to our DNA (or even if it does anything at that level). Theories range from the "single target, single hit" theory, where 1 photon strike to the right target spells doom, to other theories involving saturation and energy.

Bottom line is we don't really know, there is conflicting data from different study groups. Many of the actual dose calculations are inaccurate or speculation.

One point of clarification though, photons themselves don't "decay" over distance, it's like any other source of radiant energy. As it travels it disperses from the source. The farther you are away, the less photons hit you as they diverge from the point of origin. The key factor to exposure are time and distance.

Other than that we are not dealing with photons here, I agree with most of that.

As for the "radiation" reaching CA, this is a terminology problem. The "Radiation" will not reach that far, BUT the radioactive particles quite possibly will. Just like dust from a volcanic eruption.

Now, somebody mentioned the Iodine pills. SFAIK, these are ONLY a protection against Thyroid cancer from radioactive Iodine and related elements, which would be concentrated in the Thyroid gland and would be more likely to be metabolised if you are low on Iodine. These are absolutely no protection against radiation itself nor against any other inhaled or absorbed particles. They just make it more likely that the Iodine would be excreted rather than built-in.

Yes, the material is a different story all together. I wasn't talking about that. That is more of an environmental thing, and I don't understand how that works.

The environment can handle it if humans can, if not better. Look at the amount of vegetation immediately around chernobyl.