Deadly Deceit: Low-Level Radiation, High-Level Cover-Up

Rating:
Summary: Examine the facts and make up your own mind
Review: If you only read the chapter about Lyme disease, this book is worth it. Being stationed in Connecticut at the Submarine Base, this chapter touched close to home. I know a few people that have been afflicted with Lyme and they are waiting in line to read this book. It's easy to say that these guys are full of ...-thats what our government has been feeding us. But its amazing what you can see if you open your eyes and your mind to new ideas.

Rating:
Summary: National Cancer Institute Validates Statistical Methodology
Review: My only complaint about the book, as with other books of its type, is its heavy dose of statistical information--which is also its strength, but makes for dull reading at times. Otherwise, it's an important addition to the current literature.

In response to other reviewers...to the Washington D.C. nuclear plant worker (are there any nuclear plants in D.C.?) who claims that "Many studies have been done, and there is currently a very large body of knowledge on the subject of real (what insurance companies consider) vs perceived (what trial lawyers consider) risks." Well, since there are NO insurance companies on the planet that are willing to underwrite liability for nuclear power plants, hence the reason for the Price-Anderson Act, your comment is a bit disingenuous, at best. As for nuclear power being safe, well, even Paul O'Neill, the current Treasury Secretary and a staunch supporter of nuclear power, by his own admission considers TMI and Chernobyl to be egregious exceptions to the nuclear industry's safety records. Over 15,000 lawsuits by leukemia victims and their families hardly serve as a vindication of Three Mile Island. And let's not forget the partial meldown in Savannah, by the way. We can talk about cost rather than safety: at $3000-$4000 per kilowatt hour nuclear power is hardly cost-effective, given the current costs of $3-$4 per kilowatt hour by using natural gas. Not to mention the problem of waste disposal.

To Tim Steadham from Virginia, in a follow-up volume entitled "The Enemy Within," the National Cancer Institute's statistics and methodology confirm Dr. Gould's--the same methodology used in THIS book--showing that breast cancer rates in areas surrounding nuclear power plants are as much as +30% higher than the national average. The authors do not claim that low-level radiation causes AIDS, by the way, only that it may contribute to the deterioration of the immune system. A closer reading of the book would help you understand the premise. Obfuscating the facts with your wild opinions about the methodology doesn't change the facts.

Rating:
Summary: National Cancer Institute Validates Statistical Methodology
Review: They talk about infant mortality rates sharply increasing in Washington at the same time a radioactive plume passed over the state from the Chernobyl disaster. What they failed to mention was that the infants who died in his analysis had actually died before Chernobyl popped its lid! He used data RELEASED in the month that the plume went over Washington.

Perhaps the most egregious example of misguided epidemiology appears in chapter seven, in which the mortality rate of persons born between 1940 and 1959--and thus exposed to bomb fallout in early life--is compared unfavorably with the mortality rate for individuals born between 1920 and 1939. What the data actually show are a remarkable reduction in childhood mortality in the younger group, and little difference in young adult mortality between the groups. This is scarcely surprising since the period after World War I witnessed the major successful attack on childhood diseases, through the introduction of vaccines and other hygienic methods.

Such an oversight is not excusable in a monograph purporting to expose the hidden truth. Anyone who studies trends in mortality knows that under stable conditions, the death rate of children near the age of 10 is lower than that of any other age group. The apparent anomaly is in the older, unexposed group, not in the group exposed to fallout. If the authors are unaware of the standard pattern of mortality as a function of age, they are not qualified to interpret the data. If they are aware of it, but deliberately fail to draw it to the attention of the reader, the credibility of the enterprise is completely destroyed.

Confidence in the statistical methodology is undermined both by an erroneous formula used throughout, which mistranslates the cited source, and an evidently seriously intended use of extrapolation of a model far outside the range of the data. Thus, from 1930 to 1950 there is a fairly steady decline in total U.S. mortality of about 2 percent per year, but the decline thereafter continues at a slower rate. Fitting a declining exponential curve to the data for 1930 to 1950 and extrapolating it into the future is taken as a standard scenario against which to assess "excess mortality" in the next several decades. An alternative scenario is based on fitting a parabolic curve to all of the data from 1930 to the present. This curve is extrapolated far into the next century to suggest that if we do not see the slowing of the decline in mortality after 1950 as due to a controllable source--that is, low-level radiation--we can expect to see an unbounded increase in future mortality, starting in the middle of the next century. Such unwarranted interpretations of extrapolation from curve-fitting, taking data with a lot of scatter and using least squares to fit a curve, were thoroughly discredited half a century ago, and their resurrection here is dispiriting.

Finally, the authors' willingness to argue that low-level radiation is probably the source of tick-borne Lyme disease, and even the AIDS epidemic, exceeds any reasonable bounds of responsible speculation.

Rating:
Summary: This book is filled with lies and deception labelded as "the
Review: They talk about infant mortality rates sharply increasing in Washington at the same time a radioactive plume passed over the state from the Chernobyl disaster. What they failed to mention was that the infants who died in his analysis had actually died before Chernobyl popped its lid! He used data RELEASED in the month that the plume went over Washington.

Perhaps the most egregious example of misguided epidemiology appears in chapter seven, in which the mortality rate of persons born between 1940 and 1959--and thus exposed to bomb fallout in early life--is compared unfavorably with the mortality rate for individuals born between 1920 and 1939. What the data actually show are a remarkable reduction in childhood mortality in the younger group, and little difference in young adult mortality between the groups. This is scarcely surprising since the period after World War I witnessed the major successful attack on childhood diseases, through the introduction of vaccines and other hygienic methods.

Such an oversight is not excusable in a monograph purporting to expose the hidden truth. Anyone who studies trends in mortality knows that under stable conditions, the death rate of children near the age of 10 is lower than that of any other age group. The apparent anomaly is in the older, unexposed group, not in the group exposed to fallout. If the authors are unaware of the standard pattern of mortality as a function of age, they are not qualified to interpret the data. If they are aware of it, but deliberately fail to draw it to the attention of the reader, the credibility of the enterprise is completely destroyed.

Confidence in the statistical methodology is undermined both by an erroneous formula used throughout, which mistranslates the cited source, and an evidently seriously intended use of extrapolation of a model far outside the range of the data. Thus, from 1930 to 1950 there is a fairly steady decline in total U.S. mortality of about 2 percent per year, but the decline thereafter continues at a slower rate. Fitting a declining exponential curve to the data for 1930 to 1950 and extrapolating it into the future is taken as a standard scenario against which to assess "excess mortality" in the next several decades. An alternative scenario is based on fitting a parabolic curve to all of the data from 1930 to the present. This curve is extrapolated far into the next century to suggest that if we do not see the slowing of the decline in mortality after 1950 as due to a controllable source--that is, low-level radiation--we can expect to see an unbounded increase in future mortality, starting in the middle of the next century. Such unwarranted interpretations of extrapolation from curve-fitting, taking data with a lot of scatter and using least squares to fit a curve, were thoroughly discredited half a century ago, and their resurrection here is dispiriting.

Finally, the authors' willingness to argue that low-level radiation is probably the source of tick-borne Lyme disease, and even the AIDS epidemic, exceeds any reasonable bounds of responsible speculation.