title: Straight ally

text: "The criminalization of homosexuality led many gay establishments to operate sans liquor license, providing an open door for raids and police brutality. Like many gay establishments at the time, the Stonewall Inn was owned by the mafia, and as long as they continued to make a profit, they cared very little what happened to their clientele. Because the owners were still making a profit, they simply adjusted to the raids, and were often tipped off about them ahead of time" (Library of Congress, 2022). The Stonewall Inn remains both as a gay bar and a statement against the violence that it has survived, and has even become a National Historic Landmark. The Stonewall Inn continues to make strides within the LGBTQ+ community with its nonprofit charity. "The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative is ... dedicated to providing educational, strategic and financial assistance to grassroots organizations committed to advocacy for and crucial support to LGBTQ communities and individuals who suffer the indignities and fear arising from social intolerance here in the United States and around the world" (The Stonewall Inn, 2022).


title: Straight ally

text: In the 1970s, a divide emerged within the community over opposing beliefs on what liberation truly meant: the "liberationists" and the "homophiles".


title: Straight ally

text: Liberationists presented themselves as being considerably radical; their intent lay in going beyond acceptance and transforming traditional constructs of society (homophobia, sexism, militarism, etc.).


title: Straight ally

text: In contrast, homophiles aimed only for what was deemed realistic; instead of dismantling an oppressive system, they simply asked for tolerance. Their group maintained an apologist standpoint, where their end goal was living in peaceful coexistence with the oppressor. This assimilationist perspective held particular appeal with members of the community who were able to "blend in" with heterosexual society.


title: Straight ally

text: The existence of such a group left room for a movement that was more sensitive to the struggles, needs, and ultimate goals of more marginalized subcultures. The liberationists, who seemed to be drawing in members of such groups, filled this need.


title: Straight ally

text: The emergence of the Liberationists allowed for a wider spectrum of sexual-social behavior and identity to be represented without compromise, and with less risk of infighting. Members of the latter group would not feel forced to conform to the more socially conservatives mores of the former group, while they were able to separate themselves from elements of the gay subculture that they had found crass, excessive, decadent, or extreme.


title: Straight ally

text: Sociologist Keith Edwards identifies three stages to the process of becoming an ally in a social movement.


title: Straight ally

text: The first stage of allyship is rooted in self-interest. These allies' goals focus entirely on those they love. When taking action as an ally, their impact is individualistic – they perceive the issues of their loved one to have stemmed from the influence of a certain group of people rather than believing the issues to be symptomatic of a greater, oppressive system. This exhibition of early allyship is not necessarily harmful, but since it does not address the larger problem, its effectiveness is limited. Self-interested behavior is most often associated with parents supporting their children. Although these parents are key supporters in the community, it is not always clear whether their help extends beyond their own family and friends.


title: Straight ally

text: The second stage in Edward's model is that of the ally aspiring for altruism. This is a more developed stage than the former because the ally's motivations are directed toward combating the oppression of an entire group instead of just one individual. They are also more established in the sense that allies at this level begin to show awareness of their societal privilege, yet they tend to assume a savior role toward those they aim to help.


title: Straight ally

text: The third stage of allyship is the ally who fights for social justice. Above all else, the main driver of this stage is respect for those who are oppressed. In contrast to the prior two approaches, allies in the third stage are aware that the group they support is fully capable of advocating for themselves.


title: Straight ally

text: You can start being an ally by being understanding of how society views or treats people in the LGBTQ+ community by being open to educating yourself. Learn about LGBTQ+ history, their struggles, and the terminologies they use. "As a good straight ally, you allow the people close to you to be who they are and open up to you more by not making assumptions. You have to show action by calling out oppression and being consistent in your advocacy efforts for LGBTQ rights. Call out oppression and discrimination of LGBTQ people at work, home, school, or in other social situations. Attend protests and pride rallies. Educate your other straight friends. As an ally, you will need to challenge the assumptions, stereotypes, and biases you’ve had towards the LGBTQ community." (Queer in the World, 2021).


title: Straight ally

text: Partnership with straight allies has raised challenges as well as benefits for the LGBTQ+ community: there is a perception that such allies evince different levels of 'respect' for the community on whose behalf they advocate, sometimes being patronizing, unaware of their own privilege and power, and crowding out the members. Given that distinguishing between speaking on behalf of a group and speaking for a group is not simple, that line is often crossed without even noticing. This grey area can be referred to as 'positive respect'; a sort of force found in an ally's motives that inhibits the 'servile' (as a result of their internalized oppression) group's freedom to act.


title: Straight ally

text: Another challenge is that straight allies can be easily discouraged, in the face of scrutiny of their motives and approaches. Newer straight allies can become overwhelmed by the complication of their position in the movement. Since newer allies derive their identity from their personal relations with queer-identifying people, this limits their allyship. Allies tend to respond very defensively to criticism from members of the queer community about their understanding of queer issues, which in turn feeds a concern that they are motivated by the praise they anticipate as their moral reward. Additionally, there is a coming out process for being a straight ally that is not explicitly present in other social movements (concerns about being seen as LGBTQ+); this can hinder the level of advocacy an ally does. In other words, allyship requires support that is accompanied by a distinct protocol many find challenging to achieve. Straight allies protesting at Seattle March for Marriage Equality Allies may receive criticism for a variety of reasons. For example, some believe that allies are unable to step outside their own heteronormative world to advocate. Allies are also criticized for using LGBT advocacy as a means to gain popularity and status.


title: Straight ally

text: Studies show that elite allies have a positive effect on the policy goals of a social movement, whatever those goals may be. While allies' main role is to provide wider support for the goals of a social movement, their secondary role of influencing policy is also valuable. The allies' role is to inform policymakers of the struggles endured by a community. Allyship of this kind is often effective, though self-interested; for example, high-ranking, conservative government officials Barry Goldwater and William Weld (former Republican governor of Massachusetts), were motivated by their relations with queer family and friends to provide uncharacteristic support for pro-gay policies.


title: Straight ally

text: Castelli, P. H. (2020). No Innocent Bystanders: Becoming an Ally in the Struggle for Justice. "Anglican Theological Review", "102"(1), 137-138.


title: Straight ally

text: Clark, C. T., & Blackburn, M. V. (2009). Reading LGBT-themed literature with young people: What's possible?. "English Journal", 25-32.


title: Straight ally

text: Fields, J., & Russell, S. T. (2005). Queer, sexuality, and gender activism. In L. R. Sherrod, C. A. Flanagan, & R. Kassimir (Eds.), Youth activism: An international encyclopedia (Vol. 2, pp. 512– 514). Westport, CT: Greenwood.


title: Straight ally

text: Forbes, T. D., & Ueno, K. (2020). Post-gay, political, and pieced together: Queer expectations of straight allies. "Sociological Perspectives", "63"(1), 159-176.


title: Straight ally

text: Goldstein, S. B., & Davis, D. S. (2010). Heterosexual allies: A descriptive profile. "Equity & Excellence in Education", "43"(4), 478-494.


title: Straight ally

text: Koelz, Heidi (November 2, 2018), "The GSA at 30 – Concord Academy", "Concord Academy", Concord, Massachusetts


title: Straight ally

text: Lamers, K. (2022, June 14). "Pride month: What does it mean to be an ally?" Texas Christian University. <nowiki>https://www.tcu.edu/news/2022/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-ally.php</nowiki>


title: Straight ally

text: Lane, Stephen (September 12, 2018). "Pulpits, Pink Triangles, and Basement Meetings". "No Sanctuary: Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses". Book collections on Project MUSE. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. p. 113. ISBN . OCLC 1032288790.


title: Straight ally

text: Lee, C. (2002). The Impact of Belonging to a High School Gay/Straight Alliance. "The High School Journal", "85"(3), 13–26. <nowiki>http://www.jstor.org/stable/45400818</nowiki>


title: Straight ally

text: Levesque, A. (2019). “I’ve Always Wanted a Gay Family Member!”: Straight Ally Girls and Gender Inequality in a High School Gay-Straight Alliance. "Qualitative Sociology", "42"(2), 205-225.


title: Straight ally

text: Poteat, V. P., Calzo, J. P., & Yoshikawa, H. (2018). Gay-Straight Alliance involvement and youths' participation in civic engagement, advocacy, and awareness-raising. "Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology", "56", 13-20.


title: Straight ally

text: Queer in the World. (2021, November 23). "What does straight ally mean? + other straight ally information to help you be a better ally!" Queer In The World. <nowiki>https://queerintheworld.com/what-does-</nowiki>


title: Straight ally

text: Springate, M. E. (2019). "LGBTQ Civil Rights in America". LGBTQ Heritage Theme Study- Volume Two. <nowiki>https://www.scribd.com/document/352110175/LGBTQ-Heritage-Theme-Study-Volume-Two</nowiki>


title: Straight ally

text: Stotzer, R. L. (2009). Straight allies: Supportive attitudes toward lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals in a college sample. "Sex roles", "60"(1), 67-80.


title: Straight ally

text: Theophano, T. (2015). Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). "GLBTQ Social Sciences", 1-3.


title: Straight ally

text: Vernaglia, E. R. (1999). "Parents as straight allies: A qualitative study of the experiences of heterosexual parents in the gay rights movement". Boston College.


title: Right to privacy

text: The right to privacy is an element of various legal traditions that intends to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals. Over 150 national constitutions mention the right to privacy. On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), originally written to guarantee individual rights of everyone everywhere; while "right to privacy" does not appear in the document, many interpret this through Article 12, which states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."


title: Right to privacy

text: Since the global surveillance disclosures of 2013, initiated by ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden, the right to privacy has been a subject of international debate. Government agencies, such as the NSA, FBI, CIA, R&AW and GCHQ, have engaged in mass, global surveillance. Some current debates around the right to privacy include whether privacy can co-exist with the current capabilities of intelligence agencies to access and analyze many details of an individual's life; whether or not the right to privacy is forfeited as part of the social contract to bolster defense against supposed terrorist threats; and whether threats of terrorism are a valid excuse to spy on the general population. Private sector actors can also threaten the right to privacyparticularly technology companies, such as Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo that use and collect personal data. These concerns have been strengthened by scandals, including the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which focused on psychographic company Cambridge Analytica which used personal data from Facebook to influence large groups of people.


title: Right to privacy

text: The concept of a human ""right to privacy"" begins when the Latin word "ius" expanded from meaning "what is fair" to include "a right – an entitlement a person possesses to control or claim something," by the Decretum Gratiani in Bologna, Italy in the 12th century.


title: Right to privacy

text: In the United States, an article in the 15 December 1890 issue of the "Harvard Law Review" entitled "The Right to Privacy," written by attorney Samuel D. Warren II and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, is often cited as the first explicit finding of a U.S. right to privacy. Warren II and Brandeis wrote that privacy is the "right to be let alone," and focused on protecting individuals. This approach was a response to recent technological developments of the time, such as photography and sensationalist journalism, also known as "yellow journalism."


title: Right to privacy

text: Privacy rights are inherently intertwined with information technology. In his widely cited dissenting opinion in "Olmstead v. United States" (1928), Brandeis relied on thoughts he developed in the article "The Right to Privacy." In that dissent, he urged that personal privacy matters were more relevant to constitutional law, going so far as to say that "the government was identified as a potential privacy invader." He writes, "Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet." At that time, telephones were often community assets, with shared party lines and potentially eavesdropping switchboard operators. By the time of "Katz", in 1967, telephones had become personal devices with lines not shared across homes and switching was electro-mechanical. In the 1970s, new computing and recording technologies raised more concerns about privacy, resulting in the Fair Information Practice Principles.


title: Right to privacy

text: Alan Westin believes that new technologies alter the balance between privacy and disclosure and that privacy rights may limit government surveillance to protect democratic processes. Westin defines privacy as "the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others". Westin describes four states of privacy: solitude, intimacy, anonymity, reserve. These states must balance participation against norms:


title: Right to privacy

text: Each individual is continually engaged in a personal adjustment process in which he balances the desire for privacy with the desire for disclosure and communication of himself to others, in light of the environmental conditions and social norms set by the society in which he lives.


title: Right to privacy

text: Under liberal democratic systems, privacy creates a space separate from political life, and allows personal autonomy, while ensuring democratic freedoms of association and expression. Privacy to individuals is the ability to behave, think, speak, and express ideas without the monitoring or surveillance of someone else. Individuals exercise their freedom of expression through attending political rallies and choosing to hide their identities online by using pseudo names.


title: Right to privacy

text: David Flaherty believes networked computer databases pose threats to privacy. He develops 'data protection' as an aspect of privacy, which involves "the collection, use, and dissemination of personal information". This concept forms the foundation for fair information practices used by governments globally. Flaherty forwards an idea of privacy as information control, "individuals want to be left alone and to exercise some control over how information about them is used".


title: Right to privacy

text: Marc Rotenberg has described the modern right to privacy as Fair Information Practices: "the rights and responsibilities associated with the collection and use of personal information." Rotenberg emphasizes that the allocation of rights are to the data subject and the responsibilities are assigned to the data collectors because of the transfer of the data and the asymmetry of information concerning data practices.


title: Right to privacy

text: Richard Posner and Lawrence Lessig focus on the economic aspects of personal information control. Posner criticizes privacy for concealing information, which reduces market efficiency. For Posner, employment is selling oneself in the labor market, which he believes is like selling a product. Any 'defect' in the 'product' that is not reported is fraud. For Lessig, privacy breaches online can be regulated through code and law. Lessig claims "the protection of privacy would be stronger if people conceived of the right as a property right", and that "individuals should be able to control information about themselves". Economic approaches to privacy make communal conceptions of privacy difficult to maintain.


title: Right to privacy

text: There have been attempts to reframe privacy as a fundamental human right, whose social value is an essential component in the functioning of democratic societies.


title: Right to privacy

text: Priscilla Regan believes that individual concepts of privacy have failed philosophically and in policy. She supports a social value of privacy with three dimensions: shared perceptions, public values, and collective components. Shared ideas about privacy allow freedom of conscience and diversity in thought. Public values guarantee democratic participation, including freedoms of speech and association, and limits government power. Collective elements describe privacy as a collective good that cannot be divided. Regan's goal is to strengthen privacy claims in policy making: "if we did recognize the collective or public-good value of privacy, as well as the common and public value of privacy, those advocating privacy protections would have a stronger basis upon which to argue for its protection".


title: Right to privacy

text: Leslie Regan Shade argues that the human right to privacy is necessary for meaningful democratic participation, and ensures human dignity and autonomy. Privacy depends on norms for how information is distributed, and if this is appropriate. Violations of privacy depend on context. The human right to privacy has precedent in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Shade believes that privacy must be approached from a people-centered perspective, and not through the marketplace.


title: Right to privacy

text: Australia does not have a constitutional right to privacy. However, the "Privacy Act 1988" (Cth) provides a degree of protection over an individual's personally identifiable information and its usage by the government and large companies. The "Privacy Act" also outlines the 13 Australian Privacy Principles.


title: Right to privacy

text: Australia also lacks a tort against invasions of privacy. In the 2001 case of , the High Court of Australia explained that there stood the possibility of "a tort identified as unjustified invasion of privacy", but that this case lacked the facts to establish it. Since 2001, there have been some state-based casesnamely the 2003 case ; and the 2007 case that attempted to establish a tortious invasion of privacy, but these cases were settled before decisions could be met. Further, they have received conflicting analyses by later cases.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Constitution is the highest law in China. Privacy rights have been applied throughout China. The Constitution provides direction for all states in China and it further stipulates that "all states must abide by and be held accountable for any violation of the Constitution and the law; the law specifically protects civil rights of a citizen's personal dignity and confidentiality of correspondence.' China has a new standard and the first of its kind for the country coming into effect 1 January 2021, the Civil Code is the first of its kind sweeping law replacing all laws covering general provisions, real property, contracts, personality rights, marriage and family, inheritance, tort liability, and supplementary provisions.


title: Right to privacy

text: In many cases raised in the legal system, these rights have been overlooked as the courts have not treated each case with the same legal precedent for each case. China deploys mass surveillance on its population including through the use of closed-circuit television.


title: Right to privacy

text: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in particular Article 8(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.


title: Right to privacy

text: Under GDPR, data about citizens may only be gathered or processed under specific cases, and with certain conditions. Requirements of data controller parties under the GDPR include keeping records of their processing activities, adopting data protection policies, transparency with data subjects, appointing a Data Protection Officer, and implementing technical safeguards to mitigate security risks.[1]


title: Right to privacy

text: The Council of Europe gathered to discuss the protection of individuals, during the Convention Treaty No.108 was created and opened for signature by members States and for accession by non-member States.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Convention closed and the was renamed Convention 108: Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data.


title: Right to privacy

text: Convention 108 has undergone 5 ratifications with the last ratification 10 January 1985 officially changing the name to Convention 108+ and providing the summary stating the intent of the treaty as:


title: Right to privacy

text: "The first binding international instrument which protects the individual against abuses which may accompany the collection and processing of personal data, and which seeks to regulate at the same time the transfrontier flow of personal data."


title: Right to privacy

text: Increase use of the Internet and technological advancement in products lead to the Council of Europe to look at Convention 108+ and the relevance of the Treaty in the wake of the changes.


title: Right to privacy

text: In 2011 the modernization of Convention 108+ started and completed in 2012 amending the treaty with Protocol CETS No223.


title: Right to privacy

text: This modernization of Convention 108+ was in progress while the EU data protection rules were developed, the EU data protection rules would be adapted to become the GDPR.


title: Right to privacy

text: The new data sharing policy of WhatsApp with Facebook after Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 has been challenged in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court must decide if the right to privacy can be enforced against private entities.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Indian Supreme Court with nine-judge bench under JS Khehar, ruled on 24 August 2017, that the right to privacy is a fundamental right for Indian citizens per Article 21 of the Constitution and additionally under Part III rights. Specifically, the court adopted the three-pronged test required for the encroachment of any Article 21 right – legalityi.e. through an existing law; necessity, in terms of a legitimate state objective and proportionality, that ensures a rational nexus between the object of the invasion and the means adopted to achieve that object.


title: Right to privacy

text: This clarification was crucial to prevent the dilution of the right in the future on the whims and fancies of the government in power. The Court adopted a liberal interpretation of the fundamental rights to meet the challenges posed an increasing digital age. It held that individual liberty must extend to digital spaces and individual autonomy and privacy must be protected.


title: Right to privacy

text: This ruling by the Supreme Court paved the way for decriminalization of homosexuality in India on 6 September 2018, thus legalizing same-sex sexual intercourse between two consenting adults in private. India is the world's biggest democracy and with this ruling, it has joined United States, Canada, South Africa, the European Union, and the UK in recognizing this fundamental right.


title: Right to privacy

text: In Israel privacy protection is a constitutional basic right and is therefore protected by the Basic Law. Basic Law: the Knesset passed on 12 February 1958, but the Third Knesset. The Twelfth Knesset update to the Basic Law occurred on 17 March 1992. This update added to the law Human Dignity and Liberty by defining: Human freedom in Israel as being the right to leave the country and enter it, as well as the right to privacy and intimacy, refrainment from searches relating to one's private property, body and possessions, and avoidance of violations of the privacy of one's speech, writings and notes.


title: Right to privacy

text: October 2006 Israel established a regulatory authority, the PPA, part of the Ministry of Justice. PPA defined the Privacy Law and associated regulates based on two principles: general right to online privacy and the protection of personal data stored in databases.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Russian Constitution specifically articles 23 and 24, institutes individual citizen the right to privacy. Russia, a member of the Strasbourg Convention, ratified processing of personal data against automatic processing and afterwards adopted a new convention. The new Russian Federal Law No.152-FZ R implemented on 27 July 2006, was updated to cover Personal Data and this law extends privacy to include personal and family secrets. Its main target is to protect individuals' personal data.


title: Right to privacy

text: Privacy entered the forefront of Russian legislature in 2014 when the approach to privacy turned to the goal of protecting privacy of government operations and the people of Russia. The amendments originally modified the Personal Data Law which has since been renamed The Data Localisation Law. The new law requires business operators who collect any information on Russian citizens' must maintain the collected data locally. This means that data transmission, processing, and storage must be in a database in Russia. 1 March 2021, the new amendment came into effect. Consent from the data subject is required if the data operator wants to use the data publicly.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Constitution of the United States and United States Bill of Rights do not explicitly include a right to privacy. Currently no federal law takes a holistic approach to privacy regulation.


title: Right to privacy

text: In the US, privacy and associated rights have been determined via court cases and the protections have been established through laws.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Supreme Court in "Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479" (1965) found that the Constitution guarantees a right to privacy against governmental intrusion via "penumbras" located in the founding text.


title: Right to privacy

text: In 1890, Warren and Brandeis drafted an article published in the "Harvard Law Review" titled "The Right To Privacy" that is often cited as the first implicit finding of a U.S. stance on the right to privacy.


title: Right to privacy

text: Right to privacy has been the justification for decisions involving a wide range of civil liberties cases, including "Pierce v. Society of Sisters", which invalidated a successful 1922 Oregon initiative requiring compulsory public education; "Roe v. Wade", which struck down an abortion law from Texas, and thus restricted state powers to enforce laws against abortion; and "Lawrence v. Texas", which struck down a Texas sodomy law, and thus eliminated state powers to enforce laws against sodomy. "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" later overruled "Roe v. Wade", in part due to the Supreme Court finding that the right to privacy was not mentioned in the constitution, leaving the future validity of these decisions uncertain.


title: Right to privacy

text: In 2018, California set out to create a policy promoting data protection, the first state in the United States to pursue such protection. The resulting effort is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), reviewed as a critical juncture where the legal definition of what privacy entails from California lawmakers' perspective. The California Consumer Protection Act is a privacy law protecting the residents of California and their Personal identifying information. The law enacts regulation over all companies regardless of operational geography protecting the six Intentional Acts included in the law.


title: Right to privacy

text: For the health care sector where medical records are part of an individual's privacy, The Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was passed in 1996. This act safeguards medical data of the patient which also includes giving individuals rights over their health information, like getting a copy of their records and seeking correction. Medical anthropologist Khiara Bridges has argued that the US Medicare system requires so much personal disclosure from pregnant women that they effectively do not have privacy rights.


title: Right to privacy

text: Governmental organizations such as the National Security Agency (NSA), CIA, and GCHQ amongst others are authorized to conduct mass surveillance throughout other nations in the world. Programs such as PRISM, MYSTIC, and other operations conducted by NATO-member states are capable of collecting a vast quantity of metadata, internet history, and even actual recordings of phone calls from various countries. Domestic law enforcement at the federal level is conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so these agencies have never been authorized to collect US data.


title: Right to privacy

text: After the September 11 attacks, the NSA turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens.


title: Right to privacy

text: In March 2013, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence at the time, testified under oath that the NSA does not "wittingly" collect data on Americans. Clapper later retracted this statement.


title: Right to privacy

text: The US Government's own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) reviewed the confidential security documents, and found in 2014 that the program did have ""a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference"" in counterterrorism or the disruption of a terrorist attack.


title: Right to privacy

text: The Chinese government is conducting mass surveillance in Xinjiang province for detention of Muslims. As part of its "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" policy the authorities in China have subjugated 13 million Turkish Muslims to the highest order of restrictions.


title: Right to privacy

text: During the COVID-19 pandemic the Chinese authorities documented the contact information and travel history of every individual and issued red, yellow and green badges/codes for transportation and entering stores. These badges/codes were also sometimes misused to freeze bank accounts and pressurize the protestors who were angry about the severe restrictions. The privacy of these health codes remain unacknowledged and unaddressed.


title: Right to privacy

text: It is often claimed, particularly by those in the eye of the media, that their right to privacy is violated when information about their private lives is reported in the press. The point of view of the press, however, is that the general public has a right to know personal information about those with status as a public figure. This distinction is encoded in most legal traditions as an element of freedom of speech.


title: Right to privacy

text: Publication of private facts speaks of the newsworthiness of private facts according to the law and the protections that private facts have. If a fact has significant newsworthiness to the public, it is protected by law under the freedom of the press. However, even if the fact is true, if it is not newsworthy, it is not necessarily protected. Digital Media Law Project uses examples such as sexual orientation, HIV status, and financial status to show that these can be publicly detrimental to the figure being posted about. The problem arises from the definition of newsworthiness.


title: Right to privacy

text: According to Digital Media Law Project, the courts will usually side with the press in the publication of private facts. This helps to uphold the freedom of the press in the US Constitution. "there is a legitimate public interest in nearly all recent events, as well as in the private lives of prominent figures such as movie stars, politicians, and professional athletes." Digital Media Law Project supports these statements with citations to specific cases. While most recent events and prominent figures are considered newsworthy, it cannot go too far and too deep with a morbid curiosity. The media gain a lot of leverage once a person becomes a prominent figure and many things about their lives become newsworthy. Multiple cases such as Strutner v. Dispatch Printing Co., 442 N.E.2d 129 (Ohio Ct. App. 1982) show that the publication of a person's home address and full name who is being questioned by the police is valid and "a newsworthy item of legitimate public concern." The last part to consider is whether this could be considered a form of doxxing. With the court upholding the newspaper's right to publish, this is much harder to change in the future. Newsworthiness has much around it that is held up by court rulings and case law. This is not in legislation but is created through the courts, as many other laws and practices are. These are still judged on a case-by-case basis as they are often settled through a lawsuit of some form. While there is a fair amount of case law supporting newsworthiness of subjects, it is hardly comprehensive and, news publications can publish things not covered and defend themselves in court for their right to publish these facts.


title: Right to privacy

text: Private sector actors can also threaten the right to privacyparticularly technology companies, such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo that use and collect personal data.


title: Right to privacy

text: In some American jurisdictions, the use of a person's name as a keyword under Google's AdWords for advertising or trade purposes without the person's consent has raised certain personal privacy concerns.


title: Right to privacy

text: The right to privacy and social media content laws have been considered and enacted in several states, such as California's "online erasure" law protecting minors from leaving a digital trail. However, the United States is still far behind that of European Union countries in protecting privacy online. For example, the "right to be forgotten" ruling by the EU Court of Justice protects both adults and minors.


title: Right to privacy

text: Privacy is a major issue in the health care sector with technology becoming an essential component of it. Connecting personal data of patients to internet make them vulnerable to cyber attacks. There are also concerns about how much data should be stored and who should have access to it.


title: Right to privacy

text: Laws and courts in the UK uphold the protection of minors in the journalistic space. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) in the UK have shown that the usage of footage of a 12-year-old girl being bullied in 2017 can be retroactively taken down due to fears of cyber-bullying and potential harm done to the child in the future. This was after the Mail Online published the video without any attempt to hide the identity of the child. Following the newsworthiness point, it is possible that content like this would be allowed in the United States due to the recentness of the event. Protection of minors is a different matter in the United States with new stories about minors doing certain things and their faces are shown in a news publication. The Detroit Free Press, as an example, chose to do a hard-hitting story about prostitution and drugs from a teenager but never named her or showed her face, only referring to her and the "16-year-old from Taylor". In the UK, During the case of Campbell v MGN, Lord Hope stated that the protection of minors will be handled on a case-by-case basis and affected by the child's awareness of the photo and their expectation of privacy. Many factors will be considered such as the age of the children, activity, usage of real names, etc.


title: Right to privacy

text: The protection of minors in the United States often falls on the shoulders of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This protects any children under the age of 13 from the collection of their data without their parent's or guardian's permission. This law is the reason why many sites will ask if you are under 13 or require you to be 13 to sign up. While this law is intended to protect preteen children, it fails to protect the information of anyone older than 13, including teenage minors. It also begins to overlap with other privacy protection laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).


title: Max Beesley

text: Maxton Gig Beesley Jr. (born 16 April 1971) is an English actor and musician. He has appeared in a variety of television shows such as "Bodies", "", "Survivors", "Mad Dogs", "Homeland", "Suits", "The Last Enemy", "Ordinary Lies", Jamestown, The Outsider, Operation Fortune, and most recently Kingdom.


title: Max Beesley

text: Beesley was born on 16 April 1971 in Burnage, Manchester. His father, Maxton Beesley Sr, is a professional jazz drummer and actor, and his mother was a jazz singer who performed under the stage name Chris Marlowe. He has a step-brother, Jason Milligan, who is also an actor. He has a brother Gary who is a teacher. His parents divorced when he was a baby. His middle name was inspired by the American actor Gig Young. His father was also a regular guest on the Ted Rogers show "3-2-1", doing impressions amidst several sketches.


title: Max Beesley

text: Beesley studied in New York under teacher Sheila Gray. He is an advocate for method acting and approaches all his roles with this technique. Beesley came to prominence with his first major acting role in BBC's "", a 1997 television mini-series based on the book of the same name. He then appeared in the film "Kill Me Later" alongside Selma Blair. He also starred in Mike Figgis' movie "Hotel". He starred in the BBC Three medical drama "Bodies", which ran from 2004 to 2006 and won best drama at the Royal Television Society awards. He also starred in the BBC One series "Hotel Babylon" from 2006 to 2008, with a guest appearance thereafter in one episode.


title: Max Beesley

text: In June 2007, Beesley starred in the ITV series "Talk to Me". He also starred in the film "Red Roses and Petrol" alongside Malcolm McDowell, and in the BBC thriller "The Last Enemy" with Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Carlyle. In October 2008, he was one of the lead characters in BBC One's remake of the 1970s drama "Survivors", as remorseless former criminal Tom Price. The series consisted of six episodes, with a second series of six episodes transmitted in January 2010. He starred in the ITV drama "The Reckoning" in April 2011. Beesley gained more exposure with American audiences with a recurring role on "Suits" in 2013 and from October 2015 with another recurring role, this time in the US spy drama "Homeland" opposite Claire Danes, as ex-British special forces bodyguard Mike Brown. From 2016 to 2018 he starred in "Jamestown" as Henry Sharrow, depicting the first British settlers to colonise Virginia in 1609. He joined the cast of "The Outsider" on HBO in June 2019, which aired from January 2020.


title: Max Beesley

text: Beesley has been the narrator for several TV advertisements, including ITV, NFU Mutual's insurance, Energizer's lithium batteries, and PC World. He also provided the voiceover for Manchester United's season review DVD. In 2011, he appeared in a TV campaign for the UK recruitment company Jobsite, and was also featured on their homepage. Beesley narrated the documentary "Chatsworth", shown on BBC One in May 2012.


title: Max Beesley

text: Beesley is also a session musician, and solo artist, having had a successful career before becoming an actor. He was a chorister at Manchester Cathedral and studied at Chetham's School of Music. He also studied percussion and classical piano at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama with soul singer Omar and toured with the Brand New Heavies on keyboards and percussion. He has also toured or recorded with George Benson, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder, The JB's and Zero7. He is also a vibraphone player.


title: Max Beesley

text: Beesley has performed in concert as a percussionist and pianist for Robbie Williams, Take That, Jamiroquai, and the Paul Weller Movement. He played percussion and piano at Williams' Knebworth gigs in summer 2003 and at Hyde Park for "Live 8 London". Williams' first concert of his "Close Encounters Tour" in Perth on 30 November 2006 saw Beesley as percussionist for the second half of the show. He also played drums during the performance of "Rudebox" at Williams' second Brisbane concert and during a BBC Electric Proms show.


title: Max Beesley

text: Beesley was a member of the jazz band Incognito, but in 1994, after an eight-month tour with them, decided to end his music career and start acting. On 28 October 2006, Beesley appeared as a special guest pianist for James Brown during his performance at the Roundhouse in London as part of the BBC's Electric Proms festival. In 2020, he recorded his first solo album titled "Groove Spectrum" at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning producer/mixer Al Schmitt mixing the album. It features Paul Weller, Robbie Williams, Fred Durst, Lisa Stansfield, jazz pianist Christian Sands, Tommy Blaize, Antonique Smith, John Turrell, Omar, and Francci Richards. A multi-instrumentalist, Beesley wrote, played, and scored the album.


title: Brucellosis

text: Brucellosis is a highly contagious zoonosis caused by ingestion of unpasteurized milk or undercooked meat from infected animals, or close contact with their secretions. It is also known as undulant fever, Malta fever, and Mediterranean fever.


title: Brucellosis

text: The bacteria causing this disease, "Brucella", are small, Gram-negative, nonmotile, nonspore-forming, rod-shaped (coccobacilli) bacteria. They function as facultative intracellular parasites, causing chronic disease, which usually persists for life. Four species infect humans: "B. abortus", "B. canis", "B. melitensis", and "B. suis". "B. abortus" is less virulent than "B. melitensis" and is primarily a disease of cattle. "B. canis" affects dogs. "B. melitensis" is the most virulent and invasive species; it usually infects goats and occasionally sheep. "B. suis" is of intermediate virulence and chiefly infects pigs. Symptoms include profuse sweating and joint and muscle pain. Brucellosis has been recognized in animals and humans since the early 20th century.


title: Brucellosis

text: The symptoms are like those associated with many other febrile diseases, but with emphasis on muscular pain and night sweats. The duration of the disease can vary from a few weeks to many months or even years.


title: Brucellosis

text: In the first stage of the disease, bacteremia occurs and leads to the classic triad of undulant fevers, sweating (often with characteristic foul, moldy smell sometimes likened to wet hay), and migratory arthralgia and myalgia (joint and muscle pain). Blood tests characteristically reveal a low number of white blood cells and red blood cells, show some elevation of liver enzymes such as aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase, and demonstrate positive Bengal rose and Huddleston reactions. Gastrointestinal symptoms occur in 70% of cases and include nausea, vomiting, decreased appetite, unintentional weight loss, abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, an enlarged liver, liver inflammation, liver abscess, and an enlarged spleen.


title: Brucellosis

text: This complex is, at least in Portugal, Israel, Syria, and Jordan, known as Malta fever. During episodes of Malta fever, melitococcemia (presence of brucellae in the blood) can usually be demonstrated by means of blood culture in tryptose medium or Albini medium. If untreated, the disease can give origin to focalizations or become chronic. The focalizations of brucellosis occur usually in bones and joints, and osteomyelitis or spondylodiscitis of the lumbar spine accompanied by sacroiliitis is very characteristic of this disease. Orchitis is also common in men.


title: Brucellosis

text: The consequences of "Brucella" infection are highly variable and may include arthritis, spondylitis, thrombocytopenia, meningitis, uveitis, optic neuritis, endocarditis, and various neurological disorders collectively known as neurobrucellosis.


title: Brucellosis

text: Brucellosis in humans is usually associated with consumption of unpasteurized milk and soft cheeses made from the milk of infected animals—primarily goats, infected with "B. melitensis" and with occupational exposure of laboratory workers, veterinarians, and slaughterhouse workers. Some vaccines used in livestock, most notably "B. abortus" strain 19, also cause disease in humans if accidentally injected. Brucellosis induces inconstant fevers, miscarriage, sweating, weakness, anemia, headaches, depression, and muscular and bodily pain. The other strains, "B. suis" and "B. canis", cause infection in pigs and dogs, respectively.


title: Brucellosis

text: Overall findings support that brucellosis poses an occupational risk to goat farmers with specific areas of concern including weak awareness of disease transmission to humans and lack of knowledge on specific safe farm practices such as quarantine practices.


title: Brucellosis

text: Definite diagnosis of brucellosis requires the isolation of the organism from the blood, body fluids, or tissues, but serological methods may be the only tests available in many settings. Positive blood culture yield ranges between 40 and 70% and is less commonly positive for "B. abortus" than "B. melitensis" or "B. suis". Identification of specific antibodies against bacterial lipopolysaccharide and other antigens can be detected by the standard agglutination test (SAT), rose Bengal, 2-mercaptoethanol (2-ME), antihuman globulin (Coombs') and indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). SAT is the most commonly used serology in endemic areas. An agglutination titre greater than 1:160 is considered significant in nonendemic areas and greater than 1:320 in endemic areas.


title: Brucellosis

text: Due to the similarity of the O polysaccharide of "Brucella" to that of various other Gram-negative bacteria (e.g. "Francisella tularensis", "Escherichia coli", "Salmonella urbana", "Yersinia enterocolitica", "Vibrio cholerae", and "Stenotrophomonas maltophilia"), the appearance of cross-reactions of class M immunoglobulins may occur. The inability to diagnose "B. canis" by SAT due to lack of cross-reaction is another drawback. False-negative SAT may be caused by the presence of blocking antibodies (the prozone phenomenon) in the α2-globulin (IgA) and in the α-globulin (IgG) fractions.


title: Brucellosis

text: Dipstick assays are new and promising, based on the binding of "Brucella" IgM antibodies, and are simple, accurate, and rapid. ELISA typically uses cytoplasmic proteins as antigens. It measures IgM, IgG, and IgA with better sensitivity and specificity than the SAT in most recent comparative studies. The commercial Brucellacapt test, a single-step immunocapture assay for the detection of total anti-"Brucella" antibodies, is an increasingly used adjunctive test when resources permit. PCR is fast and should be specific. Many varieties of PCR have been developed (e.g. nested PCR, realtime PCR, and PCR-ELISA) and found to have superior specificity and sensitivity in detecting both primary infection and relapse after treatment. Unfortunately, these are not standardized for routine use, and some centres have reported persistent PCR positivity after clinically successful treatment, fuelling the controversy about the existence of prolonged chronic brucellosis.


title: Brucellosis

text: Other laboratory findings include normal peripheral white cell count, and occasional leucopenia with relative lymphocytosis. The serum biochemical profiles are commonly normal.


title: Brucellosis

text: Surveillance using serological tests, as well as tests on milk such as the milk ring test, can be used for screening and play an important role in campaigns to eliminate the disease. Also, individual animal testing both for trade and for disease-control purposes is practiced. In endemic areas, vaccination is often used to reduce the incidence of infection. An animal vaccine is available that uses modified live bacteria. The World Organisation for Animal Health "Manual of Diagnostic Test and Vaccines for Terrestrial Animals" provides detailed guidance on the production of vaccines. As the disease is closer to being eliminated, a test and eradication program is required to eliminate it.


title: Brucellosis

text: The main way of preventing brucellosis is by using fastidious hygiene in producing raw milk products, or by pasteurizing all milk that is to be ingested by human beings, either in its unaltered form or as a derivative, such as cheese.


title: Brucellosis

text: Antibiotics such as tetracyclines, rifampicin, and the aminoglycosides streptomycin and gentamicin are effective against "Brucella" bacteria. However, the use of more than one antibiotic is needed for several weeks, because the bacteria incubate within cells.


title: Brucellosis

text: The gold standard treatment for adults is daily intramuscular injections of streptomycin 1 g for 14 days and oral doxycycline 100 mg twice daily for 45 days (concurrently). Gentamicin 5 mg/kg by intramuscular injection once daily for 7 days is an acceptable substitute when streptomycin is not available or contraindicated. Another widely used regimen is doxycycline plus rifampicin twice daily for at least 6 weeks. This regimen has the advantage of oral administration. A triple therapy of doxycycline, with rifampicin and co-trimoxazole, has been used successfully to treat neurobrucellosis. Doxycycline plus streptomycin regimen (for 2 to 3 weeks) is more effective than doxycycline plus rifampicin regimen (for 6 weeks).


title: Brucellosis

text: Doxycycline is able to cross the blood–brain barrier, but requires the addition of two other drugs to prevent relapse. Ciprofloxacin and co-trimoxazole therapy is associated with an unacceptably high rate of relapse. In brucellic endocarditis, surgery is required for an optimal outcome. Even with optimal antibrucellic therapy, relapses still occur in 5 to 10% of patients with Malta fever.


title: Brucellosis

text: The mortality of the disease in 1909, as recorded in the British Army and Navy stationed in Malta, was 2%. The most frequent cause of death was endocarditis. Recent advances in antibiotics and surgery have been successful in preventing death due to endocarditis. Prevention of human brucellosis can be achieved by eradication of the disease in animals by vaccination and other veterinary control methods such as testing herds/flocks and slaughtering animals when infection is present. Currently, no effective vaccine is available for humans. Boiling milk before consumption, or before using it to produce other dairy products, is protective against transmission via ingestion. Changing traditional food habits of eating raw meat, liver, or bone marrow is necessary, but difficult to implement. Patients who have had brucellosis should probably be excluded indefinitely from donating blood or organs. Exposure of diagnostic laboratory personnel to "Brucella" organisms remains a problem in both endemic settings and when brucellosis is unknowingly imported by a patient. After appropriate risk assessment, staff with significant exposure should be offered postexposure prophylaxis and followed up serologically for 6 months.


title: Brucellosis

text: According to a study published in 2002, an estimated 10–13% of farm animals are infected with "Brucella" species. Annual losses from the disease were calculated at around $60 million. Since 1932, government agencies have undertaken efforts to contain the disease. Currently, all cattle of ages 3–8 months must receive the "Brucella abortus" strain 19 vaccine.


title: Brucellosis

text: Australia is free of cattle brucellosis, although it occurred in the past. Brucellosis of sheep or goats has never been reported. Brucellosis of pigs does occur. Feral pigs are the typical source of human infections.


title: Brucellosis

text: On 19 September 1985, the Canadian government declared its cattle population brucellosis-free. Brucellosis ring testing of milk and cream, and testing of cattle to be slaughtered ended on 1 April 1999. Monitoring continues through testing at auction markets, through standard disease-reporting procedures, and through testing of cattle being qualified for export to countries other than the United States.


title: Brucellosis

text: An outbreak infecting humans took place in Lanzhou in 2020 after the Lanzhou Biopharmaceutical Plant, which was involved in vaccine production, accidentally pumped out the bacteria into the atmosphere in exhaust air due to use of expired disinfectant. The outbreak affected over 6,000 people.


title: Brucellosis

text: Until the early 20th century, the disease was endemic in Malta to the point of it being referred to as "Maltese fever". Since 2005, due to a strict regimen of certification of milk animals and widespread use of pasteurization, the illness has been eradicated from Malta.


title: Brucellosis

text: Ireland was declared free of brucellosis on 1 July 2009. The disease had troubled the country's farmers and veterinarians for several decades. The Irish government submitted an application to the European Commission, which verified that Ireland had been liberated. Brendan Smith, Ireland's then Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, said the elimination of brucellosis was "a landmark in the history of disease eradication in Ireland". Ireland's Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine intends to reduce its brucellosis eradication programme now that eradication has been confirmed.


title: Brucellosis

text: Mainland Britain has been free of brucellosis since 1979, although there have been episodic re-introductions since. The last outbreak of brucellosis in Great Britain was in cattle in Cornwall in 2004. Northern Ireland was declared officially brucellosis-free in 2015.


title: Brucellosis

text: Brucellosis in New Zealand is limited to sheep ("B. ovis"). The country is free of all other species of "Brucella".


title: Brucellosis

text: Dairy herds in the U.S. are tested at least once a year to be certified brucellosis-free with the "Brucella" milk ring test. Cows confirmed to be infected are often killed. In the United States, veterinarians are required to vaccinate all young stock, to further reduce the chance of zoonotic transmission. This vaccination is usually referred to as a "calfhood" vaccination. Most cattle receive a tattoo in one of their ears, serving as proof of their vaccination status. This tattoo also includes the last digit of the year they were born.


title: Brucellosis

text: The first state–federal cooperative efforts towards eradication of brucellosis caused by "B. abortus" in the U.S. began in 1934.


title: Brucellosis

text: Brucellosis was originally imported to North America with non-native domestic cattle ("Bos taurus"), which transmitted the disease to wild bison ("Bison bison") and elk ("Cervus canadensis"). No records exist of brucellosis in ungulates native to America until the early 19th century.


title: Brucellosis

text: Brucellosis first came to the attention of British medical officers in the 1850s in Malta during the Crimean War, and was referred to as Malta Fever. Jeffery Allen Marston (1831–1911) described his own case of the disease in 1861. The causal relationship between organism and disease was first established in 1887 by David Bruce. Bruce considered the agent spherical and classified it as a coccus.


title: Brucellosis

text: In 1897, Danish veterinarian Bernhard Bang isolated a bacillus as the agent of heightened spontaneous abortion in cows, and the name "Bang's disease" was assigned to this condition. Bang considered the organism rod-shaped and classified it as a bacillus. So at the time, no one knew that this bacillus had anything to do with the causative agent in Malta fever.


title: Brucellosis

text: Maltese scientist and archaeologist Themistocles Zammit identified unpasteurized goat milk as the major etiologic factor of undulant fever in June 1905.


title: Brucellosis

text: In the late 1910s, American bacteriologist Alice C. Evans was studying the Bang bacillus and gradually realized that it was virtually indistinguishable from the Bruce coccus. The short-rod versus oblong-round morphologic borderline explained the leveling of the erstwhile bacillus/coccus distinction (that is, these "two" pathogens were not a coccus versus a bacillus but rather were one coccobacillus). The Bang bacillus was already known to be enzootic in American dairy cattle, which showed itself in the regularity with which herds experienced contagious abortion. Having made the discovery that the bacteria were certainly nearly identical and perhaps totally so, Evans then wondered why Malta fever was not widely diagnosed or reported in the United States. She began to wonder whether many cases of vaguely defined febrile illnesses were in fact caused by the drinking of raw (unpasteurized) milk. During the 1920s, this hypothesis was vindicated. Such illnesses ranged from undiagnosed and untreated gastrointestinal upset to misdiagnosed febrile and painful versions, some even fatal. This advance in bacteriological science sparked extensive changes in the American dairy industry to improve food safety. The changes included making pasteurization standard and greatly tightening the standards of cleanliness in milkhouses on dairy farms. The expense prompted delay and skepticism in the industry, but the new hygiene rules eventually became the norm. Although these measures have sometimes struck people as overdone in the decades since, being unhygienic at milking time or in the milkhouse, or drinking raw milk, are not a safe alternative.


title: Brucellosis

text: In the decades after Evans's work, this genus, which received the name "Brucella" in honor of Bruce, was found to contain several species with varying virulence. The name "brucellosis" gradually replaced the 19th-century names Mediterranean fever and Malta fever.


title: Brucellosis

text: Neurobrucellosis, a neurological involvement in brucellosis, was first described in 1879. In the late 19th century, its symptoms were described in more detail by M. Louis Hughes, a Surgeon-Captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps stationed in Malta who isolated "brucella" organisms from a patient with meningo-encephalitis. In 1989, neurologists in Saudi Arabia made significant contributions to the medical literature involving neurobrucellosis.


title: Brucellosis

text: "Brucella" species were weaponized by several advanced countries by the mid-20th century. In 1954, "B. suis" became the first agent weaponized by the United States at its Pine Bluff Arsenal near Pine Bluff, Arkansas. "Brucella" species survive well in aerosols and resist drying. "Brucella" and all other remaining biological weapons in the U.S. arsenal were destroyed in 1971–72 when the American offensive biological warfare program was discontinued by order of President Richard Nixon.


title: Brucellosis

text: The experimental American bacteriological warfare program focused on three agents of the "Brucella" group:


title: Brucellosis

text: Agent US was in advanced development by the end of World War II. When the United States Air Force (USAF) wanted a biological warfare capability, the Chemical Corps offered Agent US in the M114 bomblet, based on the four-pound bursting bomblet developed for spreading anthrax during World War II. Though the capability was developed, operational testing indicated the weapon was less than desirable, and the USAF designed it as an interim capability until it could eventually be replaced by a more effective biological weapon.


title: Brucellosis

text: The main drawback of using the M114 with Agent US was that it acted mainly as an incapacitating agent, whereas the USAF administration wanted weapons that were deadly. The stability of M114 in storage was too low to allow for storing it at forward air bases, and the logistical requirements to neutralize a target were far higher than was originally planned. Ultimately, this would have required too much logistical support to be practical in the field.


title: Brucellosis

text: Agents US and AA had a median infective dose of 500 organisms/person, and for Agent AM it was 300 organisms/person. The incubation time was believed to be about 2 weeks, with a duration of infection of several months. The lethality estimate was, based on epidemiological information, 1 to 2


title: Brucellosis

text: per cent. Agent AM was believed to be a somewhat more virulent disease, with a fatality rate of 3 per cent being expected.


title: Brucellosis

text: Species infecting domestic livestock are "B. abortus" (cattle, bison, and elk), "B. canis" (dogs), "B. melitensis" (goats and sheep), "B. ovis" (sheep), and "B. suis" (caribou and pigs). "Brucella" species have also been isolated from several marine mammal species (cetaceans and pinnipeds).


title: Brucellosis

text: "B. abortus" is the principal cause of brucellosis in cattle. The bacteria are shed from an infected animal at or around the time of calving or abortion. Once exposed, the likelihood of an animal becoming infected is variable, depending on age, pregnancy status, and other intrinsic factors of the animal, as well as the number of bacteria to which the animal was exposed. The most common clinical signs of cattle infected with "B. abortus" are high incidences of abortions, arthritic joints, and retained placenta.


title: Brucellosis

text: The two main causes for spontaneous abortion in animals are erythritol, which can promote infections in the fetus and placenta, and the lack of anti-"Brucella" activity in the amniotic fluid. Males can also harbor the bacteria in their reproductive tracts, namely seminal vesicles, ampullae, testicles, and epididymes.


title: Brucellosis

text: The causative agent of brucellosis in dogs, "B. canis", is transmitted to other dogs through breeding and contact with aborted fetuses. Brucellosis can occur in humans who come in contact with infected aborted tissue or semen. The bacteria in dogs normally infect the genitals and lymphatic system, but can also spread to the eyes, kidneys, and intervertebral discs. Brucellosis in the intervertebral disc is one possible cause of discospondylitis. Symptoms of brucellosis in dogs include abortion in female dogs and scrotal inflammation and orchitis in males. Fever is uncommon. Infection of the eye can cause uveitis, and infection of the intervertebral disc can cause pain or weakness. Blood testing of the dogs prior to breeding can prevent the spread of this disease. It is treated with antibiotics, as with humans, but it is difficult to cure.


title: Brucellosis

text: Brucellosis in cetaceans is caused by the bacterium "B. ceti". First discovered in the aborted fetus of a bottlenose dolphin, the structure of "B. ceti" is similar to "Brucella" in land animals. "B. ceti" is commonly detected in two suborders of cetaceans, the Mysticeti and Odontoceti. The Mysticeti include four families of baleen whales, filter-feeders, and the Odontoceti include two families of toothed cetaceans ranging from dolphins to sperm whales. "B. ceti" is believed to transfer from animal to animal through sexual intercourse, maternal feeding, aborted fetuses, placental issues, from mother to fetus, or through fish reservoirs. Brucellosis is a reproductive disease, so has an extreme negative impact on the population dynamics of a species. This becomes a greater issue when the already low population numbers of cetaceans are taken into consideration. "B. ceti" has been identified in four of the 14 cetacean families, but the antibodies have been detected in seven of the families. This indicates that "B. ceti" is common amongst cetacean families and populations. Only a small percentage of exposed individuals become ill or die. However, particular species apparently are more likely to become infected by "B. ceti". The harbor porpoise, striped dolphin, white-sided dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and common dolphin have the highest frequency of infection amongst ondontocetes. In the mysticetes families, the northern minke whale is by far the most infected species. Dolphins and porpoises are more likely to be infected than cetaceans such as whales. With regard to sex and age biases, the infections do not seem influenced by the age or sex of an individual. Although fatal to cetaceans, "B. ceti" has a low infection rate for humans.


title: Brucellosis

text: The disease in its various strains can infect multiple wildlife species, including elk ("Cervus canadensis"), bison ("Bison bison"), African buffalo ("Syncerus caffer"), European wild boar ("Sus scrofa"), caribou ("Rangifer tarandus"), moose ("Alces alces"), and marine mammals (see section on aquatic wildlife above). While some regions use vaccines to prevent the spread of brucellosis between infected and uninfected wildlife populations, no suitable brucellosis vaccine for terrestrial wildlife has been developed. This gap in medicinal knowledge creates more pressure for management practices that reduce spread of the disease.


title: Brucellosis

text: Wild bison and elk in the greater Yellowstone area are the last remaining reservoir of "B. abortus" in the US. The recent transmission of brucellosis from elk back to cattle in Idaho and Wyoming illustrates how the area, as the last remaining reservoir in the United States, may adversely affect the livestock industry. Eliminating brucellosis from this area is a challenge, as many viewpoints exist on how to manage diseased wildlife. However, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department has recently begun to protect scavengers (particularly coyotes and red fox) on elk feedgrounds, because they act as sustainable, no-cost, biological control agents by removing infected elk fetuses quickly.


title: Brucellosis

text: The National Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wyoming asserts that the intensity of the winter feeding program affects the spread of brucellosis more than the population size of elk and bison. Since concentrating animals around food plots accelerates spread of the disease, management strategies to reduce herd density and increase dispersion could limit its spread.


title: Brucellosis

text: Hunters may be at additional risk for exposure to brucellosis due to increased contact with susceptible wildlife, including predators that may have fed on infected prey. Hunting dogs can also be at risk of infection. Exposure can occur through contact with open wounds or by directly inhaling the bacteria while cleaning game. In some cases, consumption of undercooked game can result in exposure to the disease. Hunters can limit exposure while cleaning game through the use of precautionary barriers, including gloves and masks, and by washing tools rigorously after use. By ensuring that game is cooked thoroughly, hunters can protect themselves and others from ingesting the disease. Hunters should refer to local game officials and health departments to determine the risk of brucellosis exposure in their immediate area and to learn more about actions to reduce or avoid exposure.


title: Windscale fire

text: The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). The two graphite-moderated reactors, referred to at the time as "piles," had been built as part of the British post-war atomic bomb project. Windscale Pile No. 1 was operational in October 1950, followed by Pile No. 2 in June 1951.


title: Windscale fire

text: The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout which spread across the UK and the rest of Europe. The radioactive isotope iodine-131, which may lead to cancer of the thyroid, was of particular concern at the time. It has since come to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were also released. It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal.


title: Windscale fire

text: At the time of the incident, no one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but milk from about of the nearby countryside was diluted and destroyed for about a month due to concerns about its radiation exposure. The UK government played down the events at the time, and reports on the fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British-American nuclear relations.


title: Windscale fire

text: The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident. In the spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.


title: Windscale fire

text: A 2010 study of workers involved in the cleanup of the accident found no significant long-term health effects from their involvement.


title: Windscale fire

text: The December 1938 discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann following its prediction by Ida Noddack in 1934 and its explanation and naming by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created. During the Second World War, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium-235, and found that as little as might explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite.


title: Windscale fire

text: In response, the British government initiated an atomic-bomb project, codenamed Tube Alloys. The August 1943 Quebec Agreement merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project. As overall head of the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, James Chadwick forged a close and successful partnership with the Americans, and ensured that British participation was complete and wholehearted.


title: Windscale fire

text: After the war ended, the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States "became very much less special". The British government had assumed that America would continue to share nuclear technology, which it considered a joint discovery, but little information was exchanged immediately after the war. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) officially ended technical cooperation. Its control of "restricted data" prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information.


title: Windscale fire

text: The British government saw this as a resurgence of United States isolationism akin to that which had occurred after the First World War. This raised the possibility that Britain might have to fight an aggressor alone. It also feared that Britain might lose its great power status, and therefore its influence in world affairs. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee, set up a cabinet sub-committee, the Gen 75 Committee (known informally as the "Atomic Bomb Committee"), on 10 August 1945 to examine the feasibility of a renewed nuclear weapons programme.


title: Windscale fire

text: The Tube Alloys Directorate was transferred from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to the Ministry of Supply on 1 November 1945, and Lord Portal was appointed Controller of Production, Atomic Energy (CPAE), with direct access to the Prime Minister. An Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) was established at RAF Harwell, south of Oxford, under the directorship of John Cockcroft. Christopher Hinton agreed to oversee the design, construction and operation of the new nuclear weapons facilities, which included a uranium metal plant at Springfields in Lancashire, and nuclear reactors and plutonium processing facilities at Windscale in Cumbria. He established his headquarters in a former Royal Ordnance Factory at Risley in Lancashire on 4 February 1946.


title: Windscale fire

text: In July 1946, the Chiefs of Staff Committee recommended that Britain acquire nuclear weapons. They estimated that 200 bombs would be required by 1957. The 8 January 1947 meeting of the Gen 163 Committee, a subcommittee of the Gen 75 Committee, agreed to proceed with the development of atomic bombs, and endorsed Portal's proposal to place Penney, now the Chief Superintendent Armament Research (CSAR) at Fort Halstead in Kent, in charge of the development effort, which was codenamed High Explosive Research. Penney contended that "the discriminative test for a first-class power is whether it has made an atomic bomb and we have either got to pass the test or suffer a serious loss of prestige both inside this country and internationally."


title: Windscale fire

text: Through their participation in the wartime Tube Alloys and Manhattan Project, British scientists had considerable knowledge of the production of fissile materials. The Americans had created two kinds, uranium-235 and plutonium, and had pursued three different methods of uranium enrichment. An early decision had to be made as to whether High Explosive Research should concentrate on uranium-235 or plutonium. While everyone would have liked to pursue every avenue, like the Americans had, it was doubtful whether the cash-strapped post-war British economy could afford the money or the skilled manpower that this would require.


title: Windscale fire

text: The scientists who had remained in Britain favoured uranium-235, but those who had been working in America were strongly in favour of plutonium. They estimated that a uranium-235 bomb would require ten times the fissile material as one using plutonium to produce half the TNT equivalent. Estimates of the cost of nuclear reactors varied, but it was reckoned that a uranium enrichment plant would cost ten times as much to produce the same number of atomic bombs as a reactor. The decision was therefore taken in favour of plutonium.


title: Windscale fire

text: The reactors were built in a short time near the village of Seascale, Cumberland. They were known as Windscale Pile 1 and Pile 2, housed in large concrete buildings a few hundred feet apart. The core of the reactors consisted of a large block of graphite with horizontal channels drilled through it for the fuel cartridges. Each cartridge consisted of a uranium rod about long encased in an aluminium canister to protect it from the air, as uranium becomes highly reactive when hot and can catch fire.


title: Windscale fire

text: The cartridge was finned, allowing heat exchange with the environment to cool the fuel rods while they were in the reactor. Rods were pushed in the front of the core, the "charge face", with new rods being added at a calculated rate. This pushed the other cartridges in the channel towards the rear of the reactor, eventually causing them to fall out the back, the "discharge face", into a water-filled channel where they cooled and could be collected.


title: Windscale fire

text: The chain reaction in the core converted the uranium into a variety of isotopes, including some plutonium, which was separated from the other materials using chemical processing. As this plutonium was intended for weapons purposes, the burnup of the fuel would have been kept low to reduce production of the heavier plutonium isotopes like plutonium-240 and plutonium-241.


title: Windscale fire

text: The design initially called for the core to be cooled like the B Reactor, which used a constant supply of water that poured through the channels in the graphite. There was considerable concern that such a system was subject to catastrophic failure in the event of a loss-of-coolant accident. This would cause the reactor to run out of control in seconds, potentially exploding. At Hanford, this possibility was dealt with by constructing a escape road to evacuate the staff were this to occur, abandoning the site.


title: Windscale fire

text: Lacking any location where a 30-mile area could be abandoned if a similar event were to occur in the UK, the designers desired a passively safe cooling system. In place of water, they used air cooling driven by convection through a tall chimney, which could create enough airflow to cool the reactor under normal operating conditions. The chimney was arranged so it pulled air through the channels in the core, cooling the fuel via fins on the cartridges. For additional cooling, huge fans were positioned in front of the core, which could greatly increase the airflow rate.


title: Windscale fire

text: During construction, physicist Terence Price considered the possibility of a fuel cartridge splitting open if, for example, a new cartridge were inserted too forcefully, causing the one at the back of the channel to fall past the relatively narrow water channel and break on the floor behind it. The hot uranium could catch fire, and the fine uranium oxide dust would be blown up the chimney and escape.


title: Windscale fire

text: Raising the issue at a meeting, he suggested filters be added to the chimneys, but his concerns were dismissed as too difficult to deal with and not even recorded in the minutes. Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.


title: Windscale fire

text: They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident".


title: Windscale fire

text: In the end, Price's concerns came to pass. So many cartridges missed the water channel that it became routine for staff to walk through the chimney ductwork with shovels and scoop the cartridges back into the water. On other occasions, fuel cartridges became stuck in the channels and burst open while still in the core. In spite of these precautions and the stack filters, scientist Frank Leslie discovered radioactivity around the site and the village, but this information was kept secret, even from the staff at the station.


title: Windscale fire

text: Once commissioned and settled into operations, Pile 2 experienced a mysterious rise in core temperature. Unlike the Americans and the Soviets, the British had little experience with the behaviour of graphite when exposed to neutrons. Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner had discovered that graphite, when bombarded by neutrons, suffers dislocations in its crystalline structure, causing a build-up of potential energy. This energy, if allowed to accumulate, could escape spontaneously in a powerful rush of heat. The Americans had long warned about this problem, and had even warned that such a discharge could lead to a fire in the reactor. The British design, thus, had a fatal flaw.


title: Windscale fire

text: The sudden bursts of energy worried the operators, who turned to the only viable solution, heating the reactor core in a process known as annealing. When graphite is heated beyond it becomes plastic, and the Wigner dislocations can relax into their natural state. This process was gradual and caused a uniform release which spread throughout the core. This improvised process was carried out regularly at Windscale, but over the years it had become increasingly difficult to force the stored energy out. The Wigner energy release, details of the reactors and other details of the accident are discussed by Foreman in his review of reactor accidents.


title: Windscale fire

text: Winston Churchill publicly committed the UK to building a hydrogen bomb, and gave the scientists a tight schedule in which to do so. This was then hastened after the US and USSR began working on a test ban and possible disarmament agreements which would begin to take effect in 1958. To meet this deadline there was no chance of building a new reactor to produce the required tritium, so the Windscale Pile 1 fuel loads were modified by adding enriched uranium and lithium-magnesium, the latter of which would produce tritium during neutron bombardment. All of these materials were highly flammable, and a number of the Windscale staff raised the issue of the inherent dangers of the new fuel loads. These concerns were brushed aside.


title: Windscale fire

text: When their first H-bomb test failed, the decision was made to build a large fusion-boosted-fission weapon instead. This required huge quantities of tritium, five times as much, and it had to be produced as rapidly as possible as the test deadlines approached. To boost the production rates, they used a trick that had been successful in increasing plutonium production in the past: by reducing the size of the cooling fins on the fuel cartridges, they were able to increase the temperature of the fuel loads, which caused a small but useful increase in neutron enrichment rates. This time they also took advantage of the smaller fins by building larger interiors in the cartridges, allowing more fuel in each one. These changes triggered further warnings from the technical staff, which were again brushed aside. Christopher Hinton, Windscale's director, left in frustration.


title: Windscale fire

text: After a first successful production run of tritium in Pile 1, the heat problem was presumed to be negligible and full-scale production began. But by raising the temperature of the reactor beyond the design specifications, the scientists had altered the normal distribution of heat in the core, causing hot spots to develop in Pile 1. These were not detected because the thermocouples used to measure the core temperatures were positioned based on the original heat distribution design, and were not measuring the parts of the reactor which became hottest.


title: Windscale fire

text: On 7 October 1957 operators of Pile 1 noticed that the reactor was heating up more than normal, and a Wigner release was ordered. This had been carried out eight times in the past, and it was known that the cycle would cause the entire reactor core to heat up evenly. During this attempt the temperatures anomalously began falling across the reactor core, except in channel 2053, whose temperature was rising. Concluding that 2053 was releasing energy but none of the others were, on the morning of 8 October the decision was made to try a second Wigner release. This attempt caused the temperature of the entire reactor to rise, indicating a successful release.


title: Windscale fire

text: Early in the morning of 10 October it was suspected that something unusual was going on. The temperature in the core was supposed to gradually fall as Wigner energy release ended, but the monitoring equipment showed something more ambiguous, and one thermocouple indicated that core temperature was instead rising. As this process continued, the temperature continued to rise and eventually reached .


title: Windscale fire

text: In an effort to cool the pile, the cooling fans were sped up and airflow was increased. Radiation detectors in the chimney then indicated a release, and it was assumed that a cartridge had burst. This was not a fatal problem, and had happened in the past. However, unknown to the operators, the cartridge had not just burst, but caught fire, and this was the source of the anomalous heating in channel 2053, not a Wigner release.


title: Windscale fire

text: Speeding up the fans increased the airflow in the channel, fanning the flames. The fire spread to surrounding fuel channels, and soon the radioactivity in the chimney was rapidly increasing. A foreman, arriving for work, noticed smoke coming out of the chimney. The core temperature continued to rise, and the operators began to suspect the core was on fire.


title: Windscale fire

text: Operators tried to examine the pile with a remote scanner but it had jammed. Tom Hughes, second in command to the Reactor Manager, suggested examining the reactor personally and so he and another operator, both clad in protective gear, went to the charge face of the reactor. A fuel channel inspection plug was taken out close to a thermocouple registering high temperatures and it was then that the operators saw that the fuel was red hot.


title: Windscale fire

text: "An inspection plug was taken out," said Tom Hughes in a later interview, "and we saw, to our complete horror, four channels of fuel glowing bright cherry red."


title: Windscale fire

text: There was now no doubt that the reactor was on fire, and had been for almost 48hours. Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy donned full protective equipment and breathing apparatus and scaled the ladder to the top of the reactor building, where he stood atop the reactor lid to examine the rear of the reactor, the discharge face. By doing so, he was risking his life by exposing himself to a large amount of radiation. He reported a dull red luminescence visible, lighting up the void between the back of the reactor and the rear containment.


title: Windscale fire

text: Red hot fuel cartridges were glowing in the fuel channels on the discharge face. He returned to the reactor upper containment several times throughout the incident, at the height of which a fierce conflagration was raging from the discharge face and playing on the back of the reinforced concrete containment – concrete whose specifications required that it be kept below a certain temperature to prevent its collapse.


title: Windscale fire

text: Operators were unsure what to do about the fire. First, they tried to blow the flames out by running the fans at maximum speed, but this fed the flames. Tom Hughes and his colleague had already created a fire break by ejecting some undamaged fuel cartridges from around the blaze, and Tom Tuohy suggested trying to eject some from the heart of the fire by bludgeoning the melted cartridges through the reactor and into the cooling pond behind it with scaffolding poles.


title: Windscale fire

text: This proved impossible and the fuel rods refused to budge, no matter how much force was applied. The poles were withdrawn with their ends red hot; one returned dripping molten metal. Hughes knew this had to be molten irradiated uranium, causing serious radiation problems on the charge hoist itself.


title: Windscale fire

text: "It [the exposed fuel channel] was white hot," said Hughes' colleague on the charge hoist with him, "it was just white hot. Nobody, I mean, nobody, can believe how hot it could possibly be."


title: Windscale fire

text: Next, the operators tried to extinguish the fire using carbon dioxide. The new gas-cooled Calder Hall reactors on the site had just received a delivery of 25tonnes of liquid carbon dioxide and this was rigged up to the charge face of Windscale Pile 1, but there were problems getting it to the fire in useful quantities.


title: Windscale fire

text: "So we got this rigged up," Tuohy recounted, "and we had this poor little tube of carbon dioxide and I had absolutely no hope it was going to work." In the end, it was found to have no effect.


title: Windscale fire

text: On the morning of Friday 11 October, when the fire was at its worst, eleven tons of uranium were ablaze. Temperatures were becoming extreme (one thermocouple registered and the biological shield around the stricken reactor was now in severe danger of collapse. Faced with this crisis, Tuohy suggested using water. This was risky, as molten metal oxidises in contact with water, stripping oxygen from the water molecules and leaving free hydrogen, which could mix with incoming air and explode, tearing open the weakened containment. Faced with a lack of other options, the operators decided to go ahead with the plan.


title: Windscale fire

text: About a dozen fire hoses were hauled to the charge face of the reactor; their nozzles were cut off and the lines themselves connected to scaffolding poles and fed into fuel channels about above the heart of the fire. Tuohy once again hauled himself onto the reactor shielding and ordered the water to be turned on, listening carefully at the inspection holes for any sign of a hydrogen reaction as the pressure was increased. The water was unsuccessful in extinguishing the fire, requiring further measures to be taken.


title: Windscale fire

text: Tuohy then ordered everyone out of the reactor building except himself and the fire chief in order to shut off all cooling and ventilating air entering the reactor. By this time, an evacuation of the local area was being considered, and Tuohy's action was the workers' last gamble. Tuohy climbed up several times and reported watching the flames leaping from the discharge face slowly dying away. During one of the inspections, he found that the inspection plates—which were removed with a metal hook to facilitate viewing of the discharge face of the core—were stuck fast. This, he reported, was due to the fire trying to suck air in from wherever it could.


title: Windscale fire

text: "I have no doubt it was even sucking air in through the chimney at this point to try and maintain itself," he remarked in an interview.


title: Windscale fire

text: Finally he managed to pull the inspection plate away and was greeted with the sight of the fire dying away.


title: Windscale fire

text: "First the flames went, then the flames reduced and the glow began to die down," he described, "I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out. I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully," he went on to say, "but if you're staring straight at the core of a shut down reactor you're going to get quite a bit of radiation." (Tuohy lived to the age of 90, despite his exposure.)


title: Windscale fire

text: Water was kept flowing through the pile for a further 24 hours until it was completely cold. After the water hoses were turned off, the now contaminated water spilled out onto the forecourt.


title: Windscale fire

text: The reactor tank itself has remained sealed since the accident and still contains about 15tons of uranium fuel. It was thought that the remaining fuel could still reignite if disturbed, due to the presence of pyrophoric uranium hydride formed in the original water dousing. Subsequent research, conducted as part of the decommissioning process, has ruled out this possibility. The pile is not scheduled for final decommissioning until 2037.


title: Windscale fire

text: There was a release into the atmosphere of radioactive material that spread across the UK and Europe. The fire released an estimated 740terabecquerels (20,000curies) of iodine-131, as well as 22TBq (594curies) of caesium-137 and 12,000TBq (324,000curies) of xenon-133, among other radionuclides. The UK government under Harold Macmillan ordered original reports into the fire to be heavily censored and information about the incident to be kept largely secret, and it later came to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were released during the fire.


title: Windscale fire

text: Later reworking of contamination data has shown national and international contamination may have been higher than previously estimated. For comparison, the 1986 Chernobyl explosion released approximately 1,760,000TBq of iodine-131; 79,500TBq caesium-137; 6,500,000TBq xenon-133; 80,000TBq strontium-90; and 6,100TBq plutonium, along with about a dozen other radionuclides in large amounts.


title: Windscale fire

text: The Three Mile Island accident in 1979 released 25 times more xenon-135 than Windscale, but much less iodine, caesium and strontium. Estimates by the Norwegian Institute of Air Research indicate that atmospheric releases of xenon-133 by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster were broadly similar to those released at Chernobyl, and thus well above the Windscale fire releases.


title: Windscale fire

text: The presence of the chimney scrubbers at Windscale was credited with maintaining partial containment and thus minimising the radioactive content of the smoke that poured from the chimney during the fire. These scrubbers were installed at great expense on the insistence of John Cockcroft and were known as Cockcroft's Folly until the 1957 fire.


title: Windscale fire

text: Of particular concern at the time was the radioactive isotope iodine-131, with a half-life of about eight days. Iodine taken up by the human body is preferentially incorporated in the thyroid. As a result, consumption of iodine-131 can give an increased chance of later suffering cancer of the thyroid. In particular, children are especially at risk due to their thyroids not being fully developed. In the days following the disaster, tests were carried out on local milk samples, and the milk was found to be dangerously contaminated with iodine-131.


title: Windscale fire

text: It was thus decided that consumption of milk from the surrounding area should be stopped, and eventually restrictions were put in place on the consumption of milk from the area surrounding the piles. Milk from about 500 km of nearby countryside was destroyed (diluted a thousandfold and dumped in the Irish Sea) for about a month. However, no one was evacuated from the surrounding area.


title: Windscale fire

text: The original report into the incident, the Penney Report, was ordered to be heavily censored by prime minister Harold Macmillan. Macmillan feared that the news of the incident would shake public confidence in nuclear power and damage British-American nuclear relations. As a result, information about the release of radioactive fallout was kept hidden by the government. It was not until 1988 that Penney's report was released in full.


title: Windscale fire

text: Partly because of this censorship, consensus on the extent of the long-term health impacts caused by the radiation leak has changed over time as more information on the incident has come to light. The release of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210, which had been covered up at the time, was not factored into government reports until 1983, when it was estimated that the fallout had caused 33 cancer fatalities in the long-term.


title: Windscale fire

text: These deaths were attributed not only to thyroid cancer, but also to lung cancer. An updated 1988 UK government report (the most recent government estimate) estimated that 100 fatalities "probably" resulted from cancers as a result of the releases over 40 to 50 years. The government report also estimated that 90 non-fatal cancers were caused by the incident, as well as 10 hereditary defects.


title: Windscale fire

text: Other studies of additional cancer cases and mortality resulting from the radiological release have produced differing results. In 2007, the 50-year anniversary of the fire, new academic research into the health effects of the incident was published by Richard Wakeford, a visiting professor at the University of Manchester's Dalton Nuclear Institute, and by former UK Atomic Energy Authority researcher John Garland. Their study concluded that because the actual amount of radiation released in the fire could be double the previous estimates, and that the radioactive plume actually travelled further east, there were likely to be 100 to 240 cancer fatalities in the long term as a result of the fire.


title: Windscale fire

text: A 2010 study of workers directly involved in the cleanupand thus expected to have seen the highest exposure ratesfound no significant long-term health effects from their involvement.


title: Windscale fire

text: The reactor was unsalvageable; where possible, the fuel rods were removed, and the reactor bioshield was sealed and left intact. Approximately 6,700 fire-damaged fuel elements and 1,700 fire-damaged isotope cartridges remain in the pile. The damaged reactor core was still slightly warm as a result of continuing nuclear reactions. In 2000 it was estimated that the core still contained


title: Windscale fire

text: as well as smaller activities of other radionuclides. Windscale Pile 2, though undamaged by the fire, was considered too unsafe for continued use. It was shut down shortly afterwards. No air-cooled reactors have been built since. The final removal of fuel from the damaged reactor was scheduled to begin in 2008 and to continue for a further four years.