Radiation Myths Harming Public Health

Radiation Myths Harming Public Health by Jay Lehr, February 24, 2010

I was recently invited to lunch by the editors of Newsweek magazine in New York City to discuss with them my views on what should be included in their next special issue on the nation's environmental priorities.

They were quite shocked when I told them that one of my top three, just behind applying DDT to stamp out malaria and improving drinking water supplies for impoverished nations, was reducing the unwarranted fear of low-level radiation that grips most of the world's population.

I was determined to call this issue to Newsweek's attention, because I had recently read Ed Hiserodt's new book, Underexposed. I cannot recommend this book too strongly, nor can I praise it articulately enough.

Identifies False Theory

Let us first examine the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) theory, by which we have been held hostage for so long.

To take it to an absurd extreme so you will easily understand it, the theory basically says that if 100 percent of a given population will die from a fall from a 100 foot cliff, and 50 percent would die when falling from a height of 50 feet, then we can expect that one person of a hundred would die when falling from a height of one foot.

Silly as this seems, we use the same theory when studying the effects of chemicals and heavy metal intake by humans. Substances such as mercury, lead, tin, cadmium, oxygen, fluorine, arsenic, and selenium are toxic in large quantities, yet critical to our health in small quantities.

We call the phenomenon of harm at high doses and help at low doses "hormesis," derived from the Greek word "hormo," which means to excite. Thus, a substance that excites a positive bodily response at a low dose and is harmful at high doses is considered hormetic. Vitamins and trace minerals clearly show the difference a dose makes. The same is true of sunlight, noise and stress.

Radiation Fears Unwarranted

A common measure of nuclear radiation is the millirem, or mrem. The average background radiation in the United States is 300 mrem per year, though higher at altitudes well above sea level, like Denver.

Low-level radiation is a "green issue." The media tends not to criticize their green friends who oppose any and all forms of radiation. Indeed, if low levels of radiation are realized to be benign, then there goes a central argument of anti-nuclear activists.

There is in fact no scientifically credible evidence that low-level radiation is harmful, yet there is substantial evidence that it actually inoculates the body to resist the negative effects of future high doses. At the same time, low-dose radiation appears to have positive effects in increasing immune system competency.

Hiserodt informs us that if we want to avoid our natural annual background radiation, we would have to move to Antarctica or live underwater in a nuclear submarine. We could also encourage people to move from the high plains of Colorado - where the cancer rates are low - to states where background radiation is low, but cancer rates are high.

But of course we are not going to do any of these things, because if an increase in low-level radiation caused any problems at all we would have seen the evidence long ago, in the form of dead bodies. If low-level radiation harmed human health, Deadwood, Colorado (elevation 11,000 feet) would be well known for its citizens' short life spans, but that is not the case. In fact, the opposite is true.

According to Hiserodt, the only people who think there is any real danger from low-level radiation are the regulators, antinuclear activists, environmental zealots and government scientists who cling to the Linear No-Threshold hypothesis.

Background Radiation Cuts Cancer

Hiserodt recounts how Dr. Bernard Cohen proved conclusively that geographic areas with slightly elevated levels of naturally occurring radon have a reduced incidence of lung cancer. The first of Cohen's studies was published in 1990, and an even more comprehensive study was reported in 1995. The wealth of evidence rocked the scientific community, most of whom had never bothered to question the Linear No-Threshold model.

Hiserodt exhaustively describes the many mice studies showing conclusively that the LNT model is absurd and that mice actually benefit from low-level radiation. He then explains that similar exposure among humans proves the very same thing.

The greatest proof, worth repeating, lies among the citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima - who were exposed to low-level radiation and went on to experience longer and healthier life spans than Japanese living elsewhere.

Study after study of nuclear power plant workers further illustrate the enhanced health of those working in an environment of low-level radiation. The most inclusive study, which was intended to show negative impacts on our nuclear workforce, began at Johns Hopkins University in 1980 and was reported 15 years ago. It conclusively showed positive effects of low-level radiation on 72,356 workers.

Perhaps the most telling real-world evidence of the benefits of low-level radiation is how the uneven distribution of background radiation around the world parallels the variations in human cancer rates. The higher the natural background radiation, the lower the local cancer rates.

Hiserodt briefly but clearly describes nuclear reactors, saying, "The new designs are even safer than the old - but how do you get safer than no deaths, no injuries, and no negative effects to the public from several thousand reactor years of operation with thousands of gigawatt hours of life enhancing electrical energy having been generated?"

Wasting Money, Lives

The question of whether tiny amounts of radiation must be avoided, even at great cost, is neither abstract nor trivial. Hundreds of billions of dollars are targeted to remediate U.S. sites even though there is no scientific basis for claiming any health or other benefit from removing low-level radiation.

Worldwide, Hiserodt tells us, the cost of such remediation has been estimated at more than a trillion dollars. This is in addition to the unquantifiable cost of lives lost by fear and avoidance of mammograms, irradiated food, and other beneficial uses of radiation.

I cannot recommend Hiserodt's book too highly. It addresses a subject few understand, but thanks to this author's comprehensive research and clear writing ability, you are now within a few dollars and a few hours of grasping this important subject.

- Jay Lehr, Ph.D. (lehr@heartland.org) is science director for The Heartland Institute

The "Linear Mafia's" Last Hurrah?

On June 29, 2005, a politicized committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences issued a well-publicized report that is in total disagreement with the unanimous French Academy of Science and Academy of Medicine's May 2005 report. H. Josef Hebert, an Associated Press writer [as printed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Little Rock, Ark., June 30, 2005, p. 2], summarized its conclusions:

"The preponderance of scientific evidence shows that even very low doses of radiation pose a risk of cancer or other health problems and there is no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless, a panel of prominent scientists concluded Wednesday.

"The finding by the National Academy of Sciences panel is viewed as critical because it is likely to significantly influence what radiation levels government agencies will allow at abandoned nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons production facilities and elsewhere.

"The nuclear industry... as well as some independent scientists, have argued that there is a threshold of very low level radiation where exposure is not harmful, or possibly even beneficial. They said current risk modeling may exaggerate the health impact.

"The panel, after five years of study, rejected that claim."

Needless to say, this report was met with outrage by the scientists who have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary - evidence that was simply ignored by a panel of the same Good Old Boys who held to the LNT hypothesis on earlier requests to examine the accumulating evidence. The reaction of Gerald Looney, M.D., a California physician, is typical:

"The medical profession is fully in favor of progress, but change is out of the question! I am embarrassed and frustrated by the rigid and reactionary viewpoints of my colleagues. Today's report carries the conclusion of a NAS panel of people who are old enough to know better but continue to support and promulgate the patently false Linear No-Threshold (LNT) hypothesis of radiation risk...

"Perhaps this myopic view could be tolerated a while longer, except that it has an increasingly harmful impact on future generations. The current public (and panel) phobia of even a single ionizing ray leads to an expectation of zero tolerance from current environmental and political leaders. Such fear and intolerance makes us easy prey and our cities potential and prolonged wastelands in the face of even a small dirty bomb producing a tiny and harmless, but definitely measurable, increased level of radioactivity over a wide area, thereby allowing a terrorist to literally hoist us on our own petard."

The doctor also has a frightening personal story to tell. He and his partner Nancy were scheduled for the type of whole-body scans (WBS) that the NAS panel's report recommends be avoided. Nancy took the advice of scientific colleagues who suggested she beware of ionizing radiation inherent in CT scans. Unfortunately, an asymptomatic cancer was already underway, and the lack of early treatment proved fatal. Dr. Looney was to take the scan, resulting in a cancer's being found on his kidney. That cancer was surgically removed, apparently successful.

Concerning the phobic position of the NAS, Dr. Looney writes:

"Public and professional policy, even when it comes from the National Academy of Sciences, seems clearly erroneous when a patient follows their official guidelines and advice but succumbs to curable pathology, while another patient ignores these same policies and thereby survives similar disease."

We began in the prologue with the sacrifice of my sister's fetus to an ignorance of low-level radiation effects, and we end with an avoidable death resulting from similar ignorance. Along the way, we saw, among many similar increases in life span and health, that a dose of 0.15 Gy would likely prevent 10,000 breast cancer deaths - with better than 99% certainty - if given to a million women.

How many more lives must be forfeited to a thoroughly discredited LNT before reason prevails?

Individual Action

So you're interested in seeing an honest re-evaluation of the effects of low-level radiation. What to do? Of course, buying and distributing huge quantities of this book would be my first choice, but there are others. If you are a member of a professional organization such as the Health Physics Society, write the president with copies to the other officers giving your opinion. There are organizations where the officers are very much behind the movement to bury the LNT theory but keep a low profile because of the "you've got to be kidding" response they tend to get on the subject. As knowledge of the subject becomes more widespread, more leaders are likely to become involved in the debate.

It may seem trite, but in this matter, writing your congressman and senators may have an effect. (Letters that don't start out "Why hasn't the government sent me my [fill in the benefit]..." get more attention because of their rarity.) As the debate heats up over the next months or years, an informative letter to your representative might even be appreciated.

Finally, this subject makes for a great letter to the editor. It is up to those of us who "know" to spread the word. With so much at stake, it is a timely and noble cause.

I leave you with my favorite quotation from one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, the late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. He said it in 1965, long before the present controversy over the effects of low-level radiation, but certainly his words apply to today's battle with the false propositions of the LNT and collective dose:

"We look for a new law by the following process: first we guess at it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, the law is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. That is all there is to that."

Regulatory Agencies

There are a number of national and international regulatory agencies (not to mention state, county and municipal affiliates) whose entire reason for existence is to measure, verify measurement, and regulate levels of ionizing radiation. If the radiation hazard is defined as a linear relationship between radiation dose and effect (the LNT theory), then the job is relatively straightforward. But abandonment of the LNT would mean tossing most reference books, revising all the charts, and taking down the ubiquitous posters with such catchy phrases as "Every Gamma Ray Can Be a Killer" or "Do You Really Need an X-ray?"

Given an understanding of low-level effects, many government agencies involved in such "non-protection" might mercifully go down the tubes; but for the technicians who have been working in the radiation environment, there may well be a silver lining. It is they who understand the mechanics of radiation - so who better to become operators or partners in the "hormesis clinics" that would undoubtedly spring up once the beneficial effects of low-level radiation were known? ("Good morning, Mrs. Jones, would you be interested in our special on two rads of deep therapy X-rays today for $225? It comes with a bonus of an hour in the 200 pCi per liter arthritis-relief chamber.")

As mentioned earlier, when one is looking forward to retirement, retraining is not a gratifying option - but what is the choice here? It is job security for a few people (who are, incidentally, quite employable) versus the continued enslavement of us all to a lie posing as science: the LNT hypothesis. At issue are the lives of all those who will die by following the LNT theory. Eventually, the truth will prevail - and we should continue to ask, "Why not now, rather than later?"

Some Background for the Study

A 1978 report raise the question of low-dose ionizing radiation risk to nuclear workers at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, shipyard. [Identified as "Najarian, 1978" in the Johns Hopkins Report Introduction, referring to brief study done by Dr. Thomas Najarian, a hematologist at the Boston Veterans Administration hospital.]

In 1980, a U.S. Department of Energy contract was granted to the Department of Epidemiology at The Johns Hopkins University to study "Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation in Shipyard Workers." [DOE Contract Number DE-AC02-79EV10095.]

It is apparent from the introduction that this was expected to be a confirmation of the earlier "limited study" and certainly had nothing to do with verification of the hormesis principle - which it ended up being. [The term "radiation hormesis" had not even been used yet, as Luckey's first book was still a year or two away when the contract was awarded.]

The study involved an initial pool of 700,000 workers - including 108,000 nuclear workers - at two private and six government shipyards. Most were weeded out because of missing or incomplete records. Then too, many of the non-nuclear workers did not work in a shipyard during the time when nuclear overhauls were done and were therefore not considered to be comparable to nuclear workers. Two other steps - a crosscheck of records and a questionnaire to the worker or next of kin - pared the list down to 72,356 qualified subjects. Workers were divided into three categories:

1. Those with duties not involving radiation, the Non-Nuclear Workers (NNW's - or in our case, the Nones). This group of 33,352 workers was used as the control.

2. Those who had cumulative exposure of less than 500 mrem. These were termed NW<0.5, which we will call the Lows, and totaled 10,462 workers.

3. Those with cumulative exposures greater than or equal to 500 mrem. They were referred to as NW>0.5, which we'll refer to as the Highs, numbering 28,542 workers.

Results of the study were tabulated to show mortality ratios of the above cohorts from various types of cancer and from all causes. By the way, althought the Johns Hopkins report to the Department of Energy was completed nearly fifteen years ago, the Energy Department has yet to acknowledge the results and issue its report on the study.

A Few Snippets

Allow me to give you just a few snippets on other subjects related to both medicine and radiation:

"Court-Brown and Doll (1958) using a standard cohort technique, analyuzed the mortality of radiologists belonging to the 2 major radiological societies in the United Kingdom through 1956. Radiologists joining radiological societies after 1920 have had 176 deaths if they had the same life expectancy as the general population, or 169 death if their life expectancy was the same as that of physicians in general. Only 145 deaths were recorded." [Henry, Hugh (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Is all radiation harmful? Journal of the American Medical Association, 16, 671, 1961.]

A study of 100,000 female radiology technicians, with a mean follow-up time of twenty-nine years since certification, showed no association for breast cancer with vocational experience in radio-therapy, nuclear medicine or fluoroscopy. [Boice, J.D., et al. U.S. National Cancer Institute risk of breast cancer evaluation. Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 274, No. 5, 1995.]

"A critical review of the literature leads to the conclusion that at the radiation doses generally of concern in radiation protection [greater than 2 gray (or 200,000 mrad)], protracted exposures to low linear energy transfer (LET) radiation does not appear to cause lung cancer. There is, in fact, indication of reduction of the natural incidence. [Emphasis added.] [Rossi, H. and Zaider, M. Radiogenic lung cancer: the effects of low doses of low linear energy transfer (LET) radiation. Radiation Environmental Biophysics, 36, 1997.]

Finally, there is the connection between cancer and the application of radium to watch dials, which is fairly notorious in medical texts. The women (there were only about a dozen men in this vocation) touched their tongues to their brushes while painting, thereby receiving a large internal dose. Just as in the case of H-bomb test fallout victims, I thought all the painters died early deaths from radiation-induced cancer. Perhaps the literature left you with the same erroneous impression.

"The absence of leukemia and other potential radiogenic cancers in the population of highly exposed radium dial painters - from both internal and external radiation - contradicts the LNT; moreover, the increase longevity of these workers has been noted, but competent documentation does not exist at this time." [Note: Support for study of these workers has been cancelled.] [Kondo, Sohei. (Senior Researcher, Atomic Energy Research Institute, Osaka) Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation. Kinki University Press, Osaka, and Medical Physics Publishing, Madison, Wisc., 1993.]

***

Before turning the page, consider for a moment what evidence it would take to make you a "hormesian." (Not to worry, I promise not to use that word again.)

United States (again)

"Studies of populations chronically exposed to low-level radiation, such as those residing in regions of elevated natural radiation, have not shown consistent or conclusive evidence of an associated increase in the risk of cancer." [This statement conflicts with the conclusions of the report.] [From the Executive Summary, Carcinogenic Effects. Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation Committee (BEIR) of the National Academy of Science, Report V, 1990, p. 5.

In a study of 900,000 U.S. residents with various levels of radium in water supplies, the BEIR was confounded by finding more bone cancer in Chicago - with only 1 mBq/l - than in the areas where the level exceeded 110 mBq/l. [From BEIR IV, Health Risks of Radon and Other Deposited Alpha Emitters, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1988.]

A multivariant examination of forty-three urban populations of the United States showed a statistically significant negative correlation [more radiation, less cancer] between total cancer mortality and background levels of ionizing radiation. [Hickey, R.J., et al. Low level ionizing radiation and human mortality; multi-regional epidemiological studies. Health Physics, 40, 625, 1981.]

American Weapons Plant Workers

In the first of several planned efforts to combine data on workers at all Department of Energy facilities, this 1989 study was supervised by Dr. Ethel Gilbert of the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. [Gilbert, E.S., et al. Analysis of Combined Mortality Data on Workers at the Hanford Site, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Radiation Research, 120, 19, 1989.]

Table III of the report gives a breakdown of Causes of Deaths for 3,368 workers out of a total exposed population of 35,933; these data are summarized in Figure 19.

Source for Figure 19 Combined Mortality Data: Gilbert, E.S., Fry, S.A., Wiggs, L.D., Voelz, G., Cragle, D., and Gilbert, G.R. Analysis of Combined Mortality Data on Workers at the Hanford Site, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Radiation Research, 120, 19, 1989. Also American Journal of Epidemiology, 131, 917, 1990.

The report summary has some interesting observations:

"These combined analyses provide no evidence of a correlation between radiation exposure and mortality from all cancer or from leukemia. Of eleven other specific types of cancer analyzed, multliple myeloma was the only cancer found to exhibit a statistically significant correlation with radiation exposure. Estimates of the excess risk of all cancer and of leukemia, based on the combined data, were negative." [Emphasis added.]

Sounds terrific for LNT opponents! Could it ever be made more clear than by saying "the analyses provide no evidence of a correlation between radiation exposure and mortality from all cancer or from leukemia"? No doubt the report conclusions will cast aspersions on the LNT and set the stage for hormesis resarch, right? Well, not exactly. It continues:

"SMRs for all cancers were significantly less than one in all three populations, probably because of selection bias and other factors related to the healthy worker effect." [Emphasis added.]

You would think that in a study that expects to "provide a direct assessment of health risk" from exposure to low-level radiation, a provision would be made to eliminate the healthy worker effect. Certainly there were enough non-exposed personnel at these facilities to provide a control cohort. The question is, "Why wasn't this done?"

Ruling out conspiracy and stupidity, one is left with only one possibility I can think of: It was expected that the data would show a cancer mortality rate higher than predicted by the standardized rate - which would be the case if the LNT and collective dose were true. No provision was made for the "unexpected result," thus leaving the study with the extremely weak conclusion that the data showed a negative correlation probably because of well, eh, ah... you know. Almost without doubt the researchers were honest, intelligent, dedicated people. But one thing was simply overlooked in analysis of the data: All results that showed evidence of hormesis were simply ignored.