Falsehood Runs Free, Truth Limps

In the scaremonger industry, each new terror has a way of not only supplanting old terrors but also obliterating them from the public memory. We can, it seems, accommodate only two or three terrors at a time. That may be a mercy, but there is a cost--those old scares never get to be examined to see whether they were true or false, They live on in the fringes of public memory, a proof of sorts that everything is wrong with our world and it’s all General Motors’ fault.

When was the last time you heard about the imminent and critical danger caused by Acid Rain?

See? The words are almost forgotten now.

Even the chattering classes are hard put to remember exactly what peril the rains were visiting upon mankind.

Yet there remain a few people, a precious few, who check the terror stories out on their due dates. They observe that contrary to scaremongers’ learned scientific opinion, the United States was not reduced to food rationing before 1990 and that dead Lake Erie is alive, not dead.

One of the best examples is the biggest scare of the previous century--bomb testing. Nothing, not even global warming, second hand smoke or the end of fox hunting in Britain could set so many earnest men and women marching, shouting and waving placards.

Some of course marched at the behest of the Soviet Union which preferred to be the only country testing bombs. But those were few. Most of the marchers were honest, earnest and gullible as only the honest and earnest can be. Told that every bomb tested added Strontium 90 or other radioactive material to the world’s atmosphere, they protested in the honest belief that they acted on behalf of their families and their children.

Plenty of scientists were available to them to supply proof that the only safe radiation is no radiation and that every bomb which went off doomed a few hundred, thousand or tens of thousands of the world’s people to cancer.

A few things were scientifically incorrect about the big bomb scare. Although there was more radioactivity in the atmosphere because of testing, it was still less than many forms of natural radiation. From all the 530 nuclear devices exploded above ground, some calculate that our intake of radiation was less than that experienced by people who choose to live in brick houses.

In time, the testing stopped, the paraders folded their banners and went home and by 1980, very few people remembered that we had supposedly doomed a generation to high cancer rates.

Now, there has been time to see the results. There are, apparently, few if any new cancers attributable to testing.

Argonne National Laboratory in the United States, an organization evoted to nuclear resdearch but one which played no part in bomb making, completed a study recently.

“Studies in populations exposed to high background radiation consistently report the lack of adverse health consequences. Instead, they often find indications of beneficial effects, one example being a stable Chinese peasant population of more than 70,000 inhabitants who have lived for generations in a high radiation area.” (Natural radiation occurs everywhere on the planet but varies widely in intensity. Some radiation in high background areas is thousands of times greater than the levels allowed to be released from nuclear facilities or nuclear waste sites, say the Argonne researchers.)

Even unnatural radiation has not produced the predicted catastrophes. Recent studies of people in X ray laboratory work, who, despite all precautions, are subject to more radiation than most of us experience, are found to have less rather than more cancers than the general population and their general level of health is above average.

The British Pugwash Group independently evaluated evidence available in the year 2000 and found no definable risk from low doses of radiation and molecular biological studies indicated that such low level radiation is at worst “unthreatening” and possibly “advantageous.”

In short, what the shouters and marchers of the 60s and 70s were not told was that radiation is natural to human life, as is table salt, and like salt not damaging unless an abnormally large amount is taken.

The word for it is hormesis, the name given to what should be a familiar fact, the poison depends on the dose. Very frequently a small dose of a substance is therapeutic or beneficial although a large dose can be deadly. Hiroshima and Nagasaki bomb survivors who had less than 20 rem exposure showed no significant induction of cancers in the following half century.

This will disappoint those who love ecologic scare stories in the way some like to hear ghost stories at bed time. Others may take some comfort from a few facts.

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November/02