to MARTIN N. I see that I have wrongly attributed these comments to MARK DUFFETT- Sorry - it is MARTIN N who criticises “the suggestion in the title that there is no safe level of radiation.”

This is not a “suggestion”. This is accepted medical fact, as re stated recently by the Director General of the World Health Organisation.
Of course I didn't reference the quack “science” of “radiation hormesis”. That idea is being promoted by dodgy DOE-funded research around the world, and by nuclear industry-paid promoters such as Doug Boreham, brought to Australia by Toro Energy and General Atomics.

Noel, you are so desperate to attribute gross malformations, which are quite common in all populations, to radiation that you consistently ignore any data that doesn't fit your prejudices. As they say, when all have is a hammer, every thing looks like a nail.

Supposing we could take thousands of women and zap them with huge doses of radiation and measure the rate of serious birth defects and compare that rate with women who haven't been zapped with anything more than normal background doses, which vary considerably around the planet. What do you think would happen?

Would an ethics committee approve such research? Probably not. No matter. It's already been done. Thousands of women and their husbands/partners were exposed to huge radiation doses when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Many got 2000 times the dose received by people at Fukushima. That's a massive dose. What happened? Nothing of any statistical significance. In over 76,000 births there were
594 serious birth defects ... as I said, serious birth defects are a common tragedy. In the control group who didn't get a massive dose of radiation, there was a similar (actually slightly HIGHER) rate of major defects.

Read the results yourself.

http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html

With regard to Fallujah, the goal is to find and fix the problems, not to just make stuff up and invent causal relationships so that the people and technology you don't like gets the blame. Don't you care at all about the families who will suffer in the future? The real need is to find and fix the cause of the problems and that requires real science, not your amateurish theory that radiation must be the cause because ... it just must be ... because you can't think of anything else.

>>As to the question of diet in that area, in fact – they went to considerable lengths to study both the diet and the soil in the area – and its radiation uptake into plants. Mushrooms, for example, very popular part of the diet there, and containing extraordinarily high levels of radiation.<<

According to this article:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/24/us-defect-chernobyl-idUSTRE62N4L820100324

>>The findings are "not definitive," Wertelecki said. A limitation of the study is that it lacked information on pregnant women's actual radiation absorption.

It also lacked data on women's diets. This is important because the birth defects that were elevated in Rivne can also result from fetal alcohol exposure or, in the case of neural tube defects, a deficiency in the B vitamin folate early in pregnancy.

"In the Ukraine," Wertelecki said, "alcohol is also a problem. Malnutrition is also a problem."<<

The Wertelecki study didn't collect the right sort of data to identify any causal relationships. It's a good thing we've got smart people like Noel to identify them for us - and without even collecting any data:

>>Radiation is the obvious major cause.<<

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/false-cause

>>MARK DUFFETT criticises “the suggestion in the title that there is no safe level of radiation.”. This is not a “suggestion”. This is accepted medical fact, as re stated recently by the Director General of the World Health Organisation.<<

I assume you're writing from the safety of your lead-lined bunker. I'd stop if I were you: don't you know how much radiation your monitor emits? You'd better stop eating and breathing as well - food and air are radioactive and they make you radioactive. If you do that you'll be sure to outlive people all those people clogging up our nursing homes and refusing to die of radiation poisoning like they should.

Cheers,

Tony

It's just like the cigarettes and asbestos, guys. You just keep on spreading doubts and confusion - about ionising radiaton as a cause of human illness and death.

Of course we can't experiment on humans. But the research on smaller species is showing the genetic and teratogenic effects of radiation. Just like, nearly a century ago, Sir Richard Doll showed, by research on mice, the cancer causing effects of cigarette smoking.

The cigarette and asbestos people were able to fudge the truth for decades. Which is what the nuclear lobby is now doing. It's just a pity that young women and children are not being protected in Fukushima, while everybody waits for "conclusive proof". Blind Freddy could see that preventive health, the precautionary principle, should be our guide.

Sorry Geoff, but I think you are comparing apples and oranges there. The Japanese study would have found chromosomal aberrations among the survivors, and they had food rationed to them that would likely not have been grown locally, and not following the ongoing residual exposure to radioactive elements.

The Ukrainian study is following the ongoing ingestion of residual radioactive substances, which may be contributing to a higher developmental defect rate.

There is a big difference between 'zapping' someone once with a large dose of ionising radiation and ingesting smaller doses of radioactive chemicals which incorporate themselves into various tissues of the body. It's a red herring and that you think you can conflate the two, shows where your level of education in radiation toxicology.

You say: "The real need is to find and fix the cause of the problems and that requires real science, not your amateurish theory that radiation must be the cause because ... it just must be ... because you can't think of anything else."

By inference, you think that the research this article is based on is not 'real science', and an amateurish theory. Well, the real data we are working on is that children in the province of Rivne have a higher rate of birth defects, many of which appear to be developmental defects and not caused by chromosomal lesions in the parents.

Real science requires a working hypothesis, and as far as I can tell many have been looked at and the fact that they are near the fallout area of a major nuclear meltdown event appears to have the greatest explanatory power.

You must also remember that in your struggle to paint Noel as ignorant of all the studies on radiation toxicology, it's not her research she's reporting on, it's Dr Wladimir Wertelecki's research, so you're basically calling him ignorant. And you are cherry picking the studies.

Tony, you are also guilty of throwing red herrings: Yes, there is natural background radiation, and yes it contributes to a natural spontaneous mutation rate. However, this is no reason to dismiss the findings of epidemiologists.

I probably should have pointed out in my first comment that the article starts with a falsehood. "More recently reports have described birth defects linked to radiation-affected areas such as Fallujah in Iraq. But, as the nuclear lobby reminds us, a link is not proof. "

There has been NO link between birth defects and radiation-affected areas. The co-mention of two things in one sentence isn't a link. When the surgeon general in the US in 1964 established a link between cigarettes and lung cancer, he didn't do it but simply mentioning the two things in the same sentence. To establish a link between one thing and another, you need some data. For example, to establish a link between depleted uranium munitions and birth defects you need to talk to the women involved and ask them lots of questions about where they were and what they did during their pregnancy. And if there are, for example, 4 different types of birth defect, you will probably be looking for 4 causes or possibly 1 cause at 4 stages during the pregnancy, etc.

Once you demonstrate a link, you must next show it is causal. Typically you must rule out alternative causes and a dose-response is useful. e.g., that people with the highest exposure to the suspect substance had the highest level of problem.

If the link is strong enough you might well invoke the precautionary principle, but in this case there is plenty of solid evidence that quite large radiation doses have no population level impacts and certainly nothing at all of the size of the impact going on at Fallujah.

Pretending to know the cause of something is really, really bad thing to do. Consider autism. Some people are pretending that they know it is caused by vaccines. This pseudo science convinces some people not to vaccinate their children and children die as a result.

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3505097.htm

People need to do the tough science of working out what is going on at Fallujah, and pretending to know the answers when you have absolutely zero evidence is a horrible thing to do