DDP President Gets Media Coverage

The Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) are an off-shoot of the George C. Marshall Institute and like them, right-wing, anti-science propagandists.  The DDP President received some press coverage on Fukushima.


And she pretty much sticks to the same old anti-health physics propaganda, that people who live in high background radiation levels don't have higher cancer rates, and that there are 200,000 hits per day in a cell from natural processes.

Yes, and people get cancer from those 200,000 hits per day and additional hits increase the risk.  There are many contributors to cancer, so just because some people live in high background radiation areas (leading to a slight increase in cancer rates) doesn't mean there aren't other factors which have decreased.  That's why we study people exposed to an excess of radiation with unexposed people of the same population.  We try to reduce other differences between populations (diet, smoking, exercise, genetic background, etc.).

That's not to say that evacuations are still a good idea relative to the radiation doses.  That is something that has to be decided before an accident.  And with that decision comes the responsibility to provide the means for safe evacuations.

The DDP President doesn't seem to understand that often some people want to evacuate either for perceived safety issues or to be able to make compensation claims.  They don't want the government to raise the radiation dose limits.

ICRP 111 doesn't give an evacuation "limit" of 1 mSv.  It says that optimization of protection should take place while doses are in the 1-20 mSv/year range, and that optimization of protection could be constrained in the lower portions of this band.  It's up to the local authorities to decide, and this is based on long-term habitability.

The WHO recommends evacuation when a dose of more than 50 mSv could be received in a week or less, or for long term, 30 mSv per month, to be terminated when doses fall less than 10 mSv per month.  Permanent resettlement should be considered if the lifetime dose will exceed 1 Sv.

Did you notice how Jerry Cuttler abounds here?  One of his "studies" is referenced (no one provably injured working within a dose limit of 600 mSv/yr) as is another (Taiwan apartments) in which he helped prepare the manuscript.  He also gave a presentation at the recent DDP meeting, where he was described as an "expert on the beneficial effects of radiation".

That takes cherry-picking to an astronomical level!