From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: OVERVIEW: "Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Coverup"
Summary: there is no level of radiation low enough to be deemed "safe"
Keywords: statistical estimates of excess # of deaths, radioactive pollution
Date: 23 Dec 92 21:30:37 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.


 
    This post contains the Overview (beginning 78 lines below) section of 
    the updated 1991 edition of "Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Radiation, High-
    Level Coverup," a vitally important book providing the kind of analysis 
    needed to offset the mind-numbing "Everything's o.k.--there's no 
    immediate health danger--go back to sleep everyone" sort of mantra 
    consitently chanted by government and nuclear industry officials 
    everytime there has been an accident at a nuclear facility.  It is 
    critical to understand however, that even the routine and "legal" 
    releases and emissions from all nuclear reactors are followed by 
    consistent increases in infant mortality and excess deaths for people 
    living downwind from such sites.  This book helps quantify the growing 
    body of research and knowledge regarding the absolutely lethal nature 
    of nuclear technology.  There is no such thing as "the peaceful atom" 
    where the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear techonology as a whole is 
    concerned. 
                                                              -- ratitor


      . . .  On rare occasion, there has been official acknowledgement of 
     the deep-seated political motivations for understating the potential 
     health effects of low-level radiation.  For example, William H. Taft,
     a U.S. State Department attorney, said in 1981:

        The mistaken impression [that low-level radiation is hazardous]
	has the potential to be seriously damaging to every aspect of 
	the Department of Defense's nuclear weapons and nuclear 
	propulsion programs. . . .  It could adversely affect our 
	relations with our European allies.[1]

     This book offers reason to suspect that the lethal nature of low-level
     radiation is no "mistaken impression."  The scale of potential damage
     was foreseen by Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling, and Andrei Sakharov, and
     was later supported by warnings from John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin,
     Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Morgan, Carl Johnson and Ernest
     Sternglass.
       We believe that the cumulative magnitude of atmospheric nuclear
     weapons testing may explain what has hitherto been a great
     epidemiological mystery, as described in Chapter Seven.  In the
     1950-1965 period, mortality statistics inexplicably stopped getting
     better, after decades of improvement going back to the discovery of
     antisepsis early in the 19th century.  During this period, the volume
     of fission products released into the atmosphere was equivalent to the
     explosion of some 40,000 Hiroshirna bombs, according to a thorough
     examination of seismic records conducted by the Natural Resources
     Defense Council.  This terrifying figure was known to the leaders of
     the Soviet Union, who were responsible for two-thirds of the total
     yield (most of which occurred in 1961 and 1962), and to Presidents
     Eisenhower and Kennedy.  Although the magnitude of this nuclear orgy
     was not publicized at the time, it led to the U.S.-Soviet agreement to
     ban atmospheric bomb tests in 1963, after which mortality rates
     resumed their annual, though somewhat diminished, improvement. . . .
       Our findings of a supralinear effect also agree with similar
     findings for cancer mortality from exposures to low-level radiation
     made by four eminent authorities:  Dr. John Gofman, Dr. Karl Z.
     Morgan, Dr. Thomas Mancuso and Dr. Alice Stewart.  All four scientists
     worked at various times for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission or
     Department of Energy.  All four concluded that the dose-response
     relationship was supralinear, which means that there is no level of
     radiation low enough to be deemed "safe".  The government terminated
     the services of all four when they each, independently, came up with
     what Dr. Gofman has called the "wrong" answer--that is, the opposite
     of what the AEC wanted to hear.
       The supralinear dose-response for infant mortality may apply to all
     deaths from immune-system damage caused by radiation-induced free
     radicals (the so-called "Petkau effect" which is discussed in the
     methodological appendix).  This generalization is supported by a
     projection of the current trend in the U.S. age-adjusted mortality
     rates (see Chapter Seven).  This projection suggests that without
     fundamental change, the death rates of all age groups will begin to
     rise in the 21st century, cancelling out previous advances in
     longevity.


 The following is taken from the revised and updated softcover 1991 edition of
 "Deadly Deceit, Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Coverup" by Dr. Jay Gould and
   Benjamin A. Goldman, with Kate Millpointer, published by Four Walls Eight
    Windows, New York, and reprinted here with the permission of Dr. Gould.
 _____________________________________________________________________________


                                  OVERVIEW



    Radiation released by nuclear technologies has had a fearsome effect on
    the environment and human health.
       Since the atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945, considerable
    research has focused on the health effects of radiation.  Early studies
    examined the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Subsequent
    laboratory experiments studied analogous kinds of whole-body
    irradiation.  The conventional wisdom from this substantial body of
    research is that high doses of radiation caused by bomb blasts can
    seriously injure human health, but that small doses of radioactive
    fallout, often called "low-level" radiation, do little harm.
       There is now reason to fear that low-level radiation from fallout
    and from nuclear reactors may have done far more damage to humans and
    other living things than previously thought, and that continued
    operation of civilian and military nuclear reactors may do irreversible
    harm to future generations as well.
       The chief findings in this book revolve around statistical estimates
    of excess deaths that have never before been part of the public debate
    on the dangers of low-level radiation.  They may shock the general
    reader, because there has been a sustained effort to withhold official
    data from the public, as discussed in Chapter Six.
       Nuclear physicists realized as early as 1943 that fission products
    released into the atmosphere could enter into the food chain, and, when
    ingested, could accelerate the deaths of millions of persons worldwide.
    As related in Chapter Seven, Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov
    calculated in 1958 that millions of people would die prematurely from
    the ingestion of fission products resulting from fallout from
    atmospheric bomb tests.
       Today we are in a position to review the official U.S. mortality
    statistics for nearly nine decades of the twentieth century, to find
    that the chilling predictions of Pauling and Sakharov may have been
    fulfilled not only during the period of atmospheric bomb tests but
    after every major accidental release of nuclear fission products.
       Most previous studies of the health effects of low-level radiation
    were based on theoretical extrapolations of how many cancer deaths can
    be expected from exposure to high-level radiation, taken from the
    experience of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims.  In this book, we
    take a completely different, pragmatic approach, guided by the
    pioneering work of radiation physicist Ernest Sternglass and physician
    and epidemiologist Carl Johnson.  We analyze the mortality data
    collected from official death certificates filed in the wake of large
    radiation fallouts.  In this way we can estimate the dose response to
    low-level radiation after the fact, rather than as a matter of
    theoretical speculation.
       As statisticians, we define an "excess" number of deaths at any time
    and place as the difference between the number of deaths actually
    observed and the number that would be expected based on national norms,
    when that difference is too great to be attributed to chance (as
    detailed in the methodological appendix).  We have found that releases
    of low-level radiation from nuclear power and weapons plant reactors
    have consistently been followed by large numbers of "excess" deaths.
       Chapter Two deals with perhaps our most startling discovery, that
    radiation from the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which reached the
    U.S. early in May of 1986, was followed almost immediately by an
    extraordinary force of mortality, amounting to perhaps 40,000 excess
    deaths in the summer months, especially in the month of May.  The
    acceleration in deaths particularly affected the very young, the very
    old, and those suffering from infectious diseases such as AIDS,
    suggesting that the ingestion of Chernobyl fission products had an
    immediate adverse impact on those with vulnerable immune systems.
       The Chernobyl disaster released so large a volume of fission
    products into the atmosphere so quickly that its immediate effects,
    though thousands of miles from the source, were revealed by the
    analysis of the official monthly mortality reports of two nations that
    make such data publicly available--the U.S. and West Germany.
       Our results were unexpected, but when we went back to examine the
    mortality data associated with previous large nuclear releases, we
    found the same pattern of excess deaths among the very young and very
    old.  We found immediate increases in infant mortality and in total
    deaths (primarily comprising older persons), which were followed later
    by annual increases in excess cancer deaths.  These excess deaths may
    be linked to damaged immune systems from the ingestion of fission
    products:  in particular, radioactive iodine, which damages fetal
    thyroids, and radioactive strontium, which concentrates in the bone
    marrow.
       This book can be viewed as an epidemiological "whodunnit," with the
    suspect revealed by Chernobyl in 1986, and the web of circumstantial
    evidence traced back to 1945.
       "Deadly Deceit" has two major parts.  The first part (Chapters Two
    through Six) presents our findings from large databases of official
    measures of radiation and of mortality.  (The development of these
    databases is described in the afterword.)  In the first part,
    statistical tests identify significant increases in mortality,
    controlling for alternative explanations with geographic and temporal
    comparison groups, and, on occasion, with tests of multiple variables.
       The second part of the book (Chapters Seven through Ten) considers
    the implications of the case study findings, pointing the way for
    future studies by offering some speculative hypotheses that grow out of
    the case study findings.
       Much of the most telling information this book offers is in its
    charts, which allow the reader to visualize the findings without going
    through the huge masses of tabular data on which they are based.  We
    have made the detailed data available to those who are interested.  One
    notable use of our related databases was a report by Greenpeace USA
    that demonstrated the toxicity of the Mississippi River.  Greenpeace
    found that from 1968 to 1983 there were some 66,000 excess deaths in
    the counties bordering the river, a figure greater than the number of
    Americans who died in the Vietnam War.  In this book, we found
    similarly disturbing clusters of excess deaths associated with
    radiation releases.  A sampling follows.
       Between 50,000 and 100,000 excess deaths occurred after releases
    from accidents at the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility in 1970
    and again at Three Mile Island in 1979.  The 1970 Savannah River
    reactor rod meltdowns were revealed in Congressional hearings held by
    Senator Glenn (D-Ohio), after 18 years of official concealment.  Our
    discussion in Chapter Four of significant mortality increases in South
    Carolina and neighboring southern states following the 1970 Savannah
    River accidents is the first such analysis published.  Among the many
    causes for the increased mortality, we found extraordinary increases in
    infant deaths from birth defects.  The government claims that no
    radiation was released as a result of the accidents, yet because the
    Savannah River facility is under military control, accurate emissions
    data are not publicly available.  The significant increases in excess
    deaths suggest a substantial release may in fact have occurred.
       The Brookhaven National Laboratory has documented hundreds, if not
    thousands, of "routine" and accidental civilian reactor releases since
    the mid-Sixties, the largest of which occurred at Three Mile Island in
    1979.  Chapter Five describes our findings of significant mortality
    increases following the accident, particularly in the ten-county area
    closest to the stricken reactor.  As in the Savannah River case, excess
    infant deaths from birth defects increased significantly after the
    Three Mile Island accident, as did excess deaths from child cancer,
    lung cancer, heart diseases, and other causes.
       Chapter Six provides evidence of official concealment and
    falsification of key data on radiation and its health effects,
    indicating why these findings have never been made public before.  On
    rare occasion, there has been official acknowledgement of the deep-
    seated political motivations for understating the potential health
    effects of low-level radiation.  For example, William H. Taft, a U.S.
    State Department attorney, said in 1981:

         The mistaken impression [that low-level radiation is
         hazardous] has the potential to be seriously damaging to
         every aspect of the Department of Defense's nuclear
         weapons and nuclear propulsion programs. . . .  It could
         adversely affect our relations with our European
         allies.[1]

     This book offers reason to suspect that the lethal nature of low-level
     radiation is no "mistaken impression."  The scale of potential damage
     was foreseen by Rachel Carson, Linus Pauling, and Andrei Sakharov, and
     was later supported by warnings from John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin,
     Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Morgan, Carl Johnson and Ernest
     Sternglass.
       We believe that the cumulative magnitude of atmospheric nuclear
     weapons testing may explain what has hitherto been a great
     epidemiological mystery, as described in Chapter Seven.  In the
     1950-1965 period, mortality statistics inexplicably stopped getting
     better, after decades of improvement going back to the discovery of
     antisepsis early in the 19th century.  During this period, the volume
     of fission products released into the atmosphere was equivalent to the
     explosion of some 40,000 Hiroshirna bombs, according to a thorough
     examination of seismic records conducted by the Natural Resources
     Defense Council.  This terrifying figure was known to the leaders of
     the Soviet Union, who were responsible for two-thirds of the total
     yield (most of which occurred in 1961 and 1962), and to Presidents
     Eisenhower and Kennedy.  Although the magnitude of this nuclear orgy
     was not publicized at the time, it led to the U.S.-Soviet agreement to
     ban atmospheric bomb tests in 1963, after which mortality rates
     resumed their annual, though somewhat diminished, improvement.
       Chapter Seven also offers disturbing evidence that many members of
     the baby-boom generation, who were born into the nuclear age,
     sustained an observable degree of immune-system damage.  The
     successive cohorts of persons born since 1945, who were exposed to
     ingested fission products in utero, at birth, or in early childhood,
     are now registering ominous increases in their mortality rates.  These
     generations are disproportionately affected by a wide range of immune
     deficiency diseases, including AIDS, Chronic Epstein Barr Virus (known
     as "yuppie influenza" or "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome") and many others.
       Chapter Ten explores a heretical hypothesis, first advanced by
     radiation physicists Ernest Sternglass and Jens Scheer, that may
     explain why AIDS first emerged in the wetlands of Africa in 1980.
     These areas of high rainfall received the heaviest fallout during the
     years of atmospheric bomb tests, as indicated by United Nations
     surveys taken at the end of the 1950s.  The surveys showed human bones
     there had the world's highest concentrations of radioactive
     strontium-90.  The hypothesis links the damaged immune systems of
     persons reaching their peak years of sexual activity in the 1980s to
     viruses mutated by radiation, and to dietary factors such as calcium
     intake.  Sternglass and Scheer cite the extraordinary case of the West
     Indies island of Trinidad, which has a population of largely African
     and Asian origin, and where AIDS is found only among people of African
     origin and not at all among those of Asian descent.  This discrepancy,
     Sternglass and Scheer propose, may be due to the dominance of
     calcium-rich fish and rice in the Asian diet, which offsets the
     tendency for radioactive strontium (which has a chemical structure
     similar to calcium) to concentrate in their bones.
       Chapter Nine examines the potential consequences of huge emissions
     from the Millstone reactor in Connecticut in 1975, the second largest
     civilian accident after Three Mile Island.  These emissions may have
     set off a cancer epidemic centered in the two neighboring counties of
     Middlesex and New London that still continues.  In our effort to
     investigate this epidemic at the local level, we found that
     publication of cancer mortality data by township, routinely available
     from the Connecticut Department of Health Services since the 1930s,
     was terminated in 1977.  We think that post-1976 mortality and
     morbidity data for the towns close to the Millstone reactors may also
     throw light on the outbreak of Lyme disease, first reported in the
     area near Millstone during the fall of 1975.
       An equally startling hypothesis is posed in Chapter Eight, where we
     suggest that fresh milk from dairy farms near nuclear reactors may
     have contributed, along with increasing poverty and other causes, to
     deteriorating infant mortality in certain urban areas over the past
     two decades.
       This hypothesis was suggested to us by statistics related to the
     Nuclear Regulatory Commission's unprecedented closing of the Peach
     Bottom reactors on the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland on March
     31, 1987 because of operator negligence going back to 1974.  The
     reactors had a long record of excessive releases of the short-lived
     radioactive element iodine-131.  The Peach Bottom reactors are located
     in one of the nation's most productive dairy farming areas, which
     supplies fresh milk to the entire Mid-Atlantic area, including the
     cities of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.  After Peach Bottom was
     closed, in the summer of 1987 infant mortality in Washington, D.C.
     plunged to the best rates in some 20 years.
       We then found a statistically significant correlation between
     changes in infant mortality over the past two decades and regional
     risks of exposure to milk contaminated from civilian reactor emissions
     since 1974.  The fourteen states in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic
     regions with the greatest risk of exposure to contaminated milk also
     had the worst infant mortality performance.  Analyzing these data, we
     found that while the exposure risk of eight Midwest states was 440
     times greater than that of three northern New England states, the
     corresponding infant mortality performance was only ten percent worse.
     This evidence suggests that the dose-response is "supralinear" rather
     than linear, which means that infant mortality rises more rapidly at
     low doses.
       Another example of the supralinear relationship was offered in the
     wake of Chernobyl.  The June 1986 increase in infant deaths over June
     1985 in the U.S. was a full ten percent of the increase in West
     Germany's Baden-Wurttemberg province, even though U.S. radiation
     levels were only one-hundredth to one-thousandth as great.
       This crucial evidence supports the 1972 laboratory findings of Dr.
     Abram Petkau, a Canadian radiation biologist, on the dangerous effects
     of "free radicals" created by exposure to low-level radiation.  Free
     radicals are charged particles that can penetrate and destroy the
     blood cells of the immune system, especially at low-levels of
     radiation.
       Our findings of a supralinear effect also agree with similar
     findings for cancer mortality from exposures to low-level radiation
     made by four eminent authorities:  Dr. John Gofman, Dr. Karl Z.
     Morgan, Dr. Thomas Mancuso and Dr. Alice Stewart.  All four scientists
     worked at various times for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission or
     Department of Energy.  All four concluded that the dose-response
     relationship was supralinear, which means that there is no level of
     radiation low enough to be deemed "safe".  The government terminated
     the services of all four when they each, independently, came up with
     what Dr. Gofman has called the "wrong" answer--that is, the opposite
     of what the AEC wanted to hear.
       The supralinear dose-response for infant mortality may apply to all
     deaths from immune-system damage caused by radiation-induced free
     radicals (the so-called "Petkau effect" which is discussed in the
     methodological appendix).  This generalization is supported by a
     projection of the current trend in the U.S. age-adjusted mortality
     rates (see Chapter Seven).  This projection suggests that without
     fundamental change, the death rates of all age groups will begin to
     rise in the 21st century, cancelling out previous advances in
     longevity.
       One striking number should be mentioned here:  The statistical
     probability is less than one in one million that during the summer
     following the Chernobyl accident the excess deaths observed in the
     U.S. were due to chance.  Equally improbable were the excess deaths
     observed in West Germany during the same time period.  And, as related
     in Chapter Three, ornithologist David DeSante found at the same time
     that the number of newly-hatched land birds counted by the Point Reyes
     Bird Observatory in California in the late spring and summer of 1986
     dropped 62 percent below the average of the preceding decade.  The
     probability that the simultaneous summertime mortality peaks in the
     U.S., West Germany, and among birds are unrelated random events can be
     expressed mathematically as one out of 10 raised to the 30th power,
     that is, one out of:

                   1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

     Even so, we acknowledge that something other than radiation or chance
     may have caused the unusual mortality phenomena in the summer of 1986,
     as well as the other significant mortality increases associated with
     radiation releases described in this book.  Our evidence is largely
     statistical and as such not one-hundred percent conclusive, but these
     significant statistics cannot be ignored.  This book is a challenge to
     the scientific community to identify plausible alternative
     explanations.
       The charges made here are too important to be left to the experts
     for resolution.  Continued reliance on nuclear technologies may pose
     an on-going threat to life on earth.  The potential danger warrants
     the widest possible audience and public debate.  As the final chapter
     indicates, it is not too late to eliminate the chief sources of
     radioactive pollution.  We can cite as hopeful examples Wyoming and
     Montana, two states far from nuclear emissions where infant mortality
     rates are among the best anywhere in the world today.


  [1] Brian Jacobs, "The politics of radiation:  when public health and the
      nuclear industry collide."  "Greenpeace," July-August, 1988, p. 7.



    _______________________________________________________________________



                                ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




    This book rests heavily on the insights and guidance of Dr. Ernest J.
    Sternglass, Professor Emeritus of Radiology at the University of
    Pittsburgh Medical School, Professor Jens Scheer of the University of
    Bremen, and of the late Dr. Carl Johnson, of the Colorado Department of
    Health.  Dr. Johnson was the first epidemiologist to establish the link
    between bomb-test radiation and excess cancer rates in areas of Utah
    downwind of the Nevada Test Site.  We also benefited greatly from
    critical comments from Dr. Donald B. Louria, Chairman of the Department
    of Preventive Medicine and Community Health of the New Jersey Medical
    School, and from Dr. Marvin Lavenhar, Director of the Biostatistics and
    Epidemiology Division of the New Jersey Medical School.
       The book is the product of a collective effort on the part of
    consultants to, and the analysts and staff of, Public Data Access,
    Inc., including Ayse Cahn, Wendy Chiang, Bill McDonnell, Joseph
    Mangano, Chinnah Mithrasekaran, David Tanzer, Ken E. Tanzer, Ken J.
    Tanzer, Eben Weitzman, and Ellen Davidson who contributed their talents
    to the research and development of the databases that provided the
    radiation and mortality information used throughout the book.
       "Deadly Deceit" benefited greatly from the journalistic skills of
    Kate Millpointer, whose chapter "Silent Summer" invokes a chilling
    reminder of Rachel Carson's predictions made 25 years ago in "Silent
    Spring," and from the editorial skills of Sybil Wong, Philip Friedman
    and Michael Tanzer, who helped with the early drafts of the manuscript.
    Thanks also go to John Oakes and Dan Simon of Four Walls Eight Windows
    for publishing the book.
       We are grateful for the generous financial support of the CS Fund,
    Deer Creek Foundation, Environmental Research Foundation, W. H. and
    Carol Ferry, Friedson Philanthropic Funds, Fund for Investigative
    Journalism, John I. Kennedy, Gloria White McNally, National Community
    Funds, Public Concern Foundation, Alexander C. Stewart, and the Youth
    Project.  We also wish to acknowledge the help of the Council on
    Economic Priorities and the Institute for Policy Studies, which have
    sponsored portions of our environmental research over the past four
    years.
       Special thanks go to the Reverend Benjamin Chavis and Charles Lee of
    the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (CJR), which
    has sponsored the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) and its
    efforts to analyze the way in which low-level radiation
    disproportionately affects low-income minority groups.  In late 1988,
    we joined efforts with CRJ in creating the RPHP in order to extend our
    studies of the health effects of nuclear releases, and to stimulate
    public debate on these controversial issues.


                                JAY M. GOULD
                                Director

                                BENJAMIN A. GOLDMAN
                                Associate Director

                                Radiation and Public Health Project
                                New York, December 1989






--
                                              daveus rattus   

                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
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