Article: 1093 of sgi.talk.ratical From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: No Immediate Danger? Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth: 1990 Summary: describing the breadth of what radiation does--not just fatal cancers Keywords: ionizing (penetrating) radiation, mild mutation undermining genepool Date: 25 Jun 1995 20:28:34 GMT Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Lines: 351 Excerpts follow from the transcript of a talk (included in full below) given by Dr. Rosalie Bertell speaking in Oslo, Norway in 1990 on the effects of exposure to ionizing (penetrating) man-made radiation. Dr. Bertell enunciates the breadth of effects to the human body from low-level radiation exposure that creates increases in all kinds of diseases including weakened immune systems, congenital defects, miscarriages, long term chronic diseases, genetic mutation (hence on-going damage of and degredation to the genepool (i.e. the future)), as well as leukemia and other blood diseases, and cancers. -- ratitor there is a hundred per cent probability of cellular damage when you are exposed to radiation Non-ionizing radiation is the use of long wavelengths for radio, heating, microwaves, infra-red etc., while penetrating ionizing radiation which occurs in gamma-ray, X-ray and cosmic-ray radiation is the radiation I will here refer to here. When a material is radioactive it means it periodically has an explosion on a microscopic level. When it explodes, it gives out energy in such a way that it can ionize--penetrate. Take for example just one atom of plutonium in a lung tissue. In exploding it shoots out particles of energy through living cells. As you know a cell is not empty, but a living system filled with different types of matter with separate jobs to do in the body. We can not feel anything of this explosion on cellular level. But it will do damage. *There is no such thing as a radiation exposure that will not do damage. There is a hundred per cent possibility that there will be damage to cells. The next question is: which damage do you care about?* The damage which is apt to cause most trouble in a whole system like a human being, is the damage that hits the nucleus of the cell. Because inside the nucleus is the chromosome material that carries the template of what the cell does. If you change that, you change what the cell produces. If you change one cell, and it is still able to produce, it makes two cells with damaged chromosomes which can cause exponential growth of cells that are not going to do the right thing. . . . You know it takes only one ovum and one sperm to make a baby, and the DNA in that cell contains all the information on how to make a normal baby. If you start destroying that DNA, you get a deformed child or a sick child. We always have to remember that the future generations on this planet are not nebulous, we are right now carring them in our bodies, they don't come from out of space! They come from the sperm and the ovum that are right now living in the bodies of people living on this planet. If we destroy that, we have no way of putting it back together again. ______________________________________________________________________________ The following, "No Immediate danger? Prognosis for a radioactive earth," appearred in "Women and sustainable development: a report from Women's forum in Bergen, Norway, 14-15 May 1990," published by the Center for Information on Women and Development, Oslo, Norway, 1990, pp. 18-21. Dr. Rosalie Bertell has a doctorate in Biometry, which is the use of mathematics to understand and predict biolological processes, for example in cancer research. For more than twenty years she has worked with health-oriented environmental protection with special emphasis on the consequences of radioactive radiation. She is the President of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in Toronto, Canada, and one of the founders of the International Commission for Health Professionals in Geneva. This Commission works with health personnel to secure human rights. Dr. Bertell has been a consultant for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Environmental Protection Agency. In her book "No immediate danger, Prognosis for a radioactive earth," (Women's Press, London 1985) she sums up the damaging effects of low-level radiation, the genetic damage to human beings as well as the effects of the increasing background radiation from nuclear power plants and the nuclear weapons industry. Dr. Rosalie Bertell: -------------------- No immediate danger? Prognosis for a radioactive earth The operating mode in our Society is called risk-benefit planning. Everything is done on the basis of risks and benefits. Risks are life and health--dying of cancer, having a deformed child. The benefit side is to make money or to gain political or social power. The bad news is that the people who make these rational trade-offs for us, are the same people as get the benefits. I will talk about sustainable development in a very different way than what they do at the official Conference. I would compare this to your own personal experience: If you have gotten beyond youth and good health and suddenly have to confront chronic illness, you begin to realize what it is to sustain what you are doing. The kind of work you do, the amount of sleep, the amount of food, the amount of new undertakings are very much limited by your personal energy and your personal ability to sustain it. In the same sense the human race has limitations. We act as if that part is all automatic, but that is not true. Damage the future generations Another unconscious assumption is that as long as we make sure there are enough resources around in the future, there is no problem for the future generations--they can just go ahead and do what they want. In fact we talk about "the freedom of choice for the future generations." I want to talk about something called mild mutations which is a very subtle undermining of the genepool. It is not talked about, it is not measured, but it is occuring. What you do is to create a next generation that is physically less able to cope with hazardious material than their parents were. If you do two things at once: you mildly damage the next generation--genetic damage--and you increase the hazards in the environment, then you can do this for two or three generations and you are finished. People will be physically less able to cope, and they will have more to cope with. We are also talking about physical damage to the brain, inablility to think as clearly and as well as previous generations. With aboveground weapon testing there was a decrease in general intelligence quotient as measured by standardized tests. They are starting to admit it now even in official publications. In a recent publication from the US Academy of Science it is admitted that exposure of the fetus to radiation between the eighth and the fifteenth week lowers mental ability, causes mental retardation. I am going to use radiation as the basic pollutant, because it is so all pervading. Explosion in living cells Non-ionizing radiation is the use of long wavelengths for radio, heating, microwaves, infra-red etc., while penetrating ionizing radiation which occurs in gamma-ray, X-ray and cosmic-ray radiation is the radiation I will here refer to here. When a material is radioactive it means it periodically has an explosion on a microscopic level. When it explodes, it gives out energy in such a way that it can ionize--penetrate. Take for example just one atom of plutonium in a lung tissue. In exploding it shoots out particles of energy through living cells. As you know a cell is not empty, but a living system filled with different types of matter with separate jobs to do in the body. We can not feel anything of this explosion on cellular level. But it will do damage. *There is no such thing as a radiation exposure that will not do damage. There is a hundred per cent possibility that there will be damage to cells. The next question is: which damage do you care about?* The damage which is apt to cause most trouble in a whole system like a human being, is the damage that hits the nucleus of the cell. Because inside the nucleus is the chromosome material that carries the template of what the cell does. If you change that, you change what the cell produces. If you change one cell, and it is still able to produce, it makes two cells with damaged chromosomes which can cause exponential growth of cells that are not going to do the right thing. An example of an illness that results from this is adult diabetes where the person has sufficient insulin, but it doesn't work to bring down the blood sugar. It is mutated. Another example is allergy. You may get allergy as an adult--then you have stopped producing antibodies. Over time we build up things like inability to digest food, we don't recover as quickly after illness, we get hormone problems and so on. All this comes from this kind of changes and mistakes in the chromosome material. Waste precious resources The one type of damage talked about the most, is when you upset a cell's resting mechanism. Then you get a cancer or a tumor. Normally a cell reproduces and then rests. If you eliminate that rest, the cell just reproduces all the time and you get a lot of cells in one place, a tumor. You know it takes only one ovum and one sperm to make a baby, and the DNA in that cell contains all the information on how to make a normal baby. If you start destroying that DNA, you get a deformed child or a sick child. We always have to remember that the future generations on this planet are not nebulous, we are right now carring them in our bodies, they don't come from out of space! They come from the sperm and the ovum that are right now living in the bodies of people living on this planet. If we destroy that, we have no way of putting it back together again. To sum up: Mild mutation is damage to the genetic material which shows up in the children as either obvious disability or asthma, allergy, immune deficiency, childhood cancer, etc. These are very real and are occuring. We can increase the rate of the damage, and we have done just that. This is probably the most insane way to waste the precious resources of the world. Whatever I say about humans also is true in the animals and the plants that produce our food. We are killing ourselves with our suvival strategy. We think we are saving overselves, but instead we are undermining our ability to survive. Not only cancer For many years we have known that radiation causes damage to human cells, and we have heard about genetic damage and cancers. But already in the fifties medical radiologists started looking at their own first causes of death and discovered that not only were they dying at a higher rate from cancer, but that they also were dying at an higher rate from everything else: cardiovascular, renal disease and other chronic illnesses. I am trying to show you the breadth of what radiation does. We receive so much propaganda saying that if you are exposed to radiation you have a chance of getting cancer, and if you don't get cancer you don't get anything. But to repeat: there is a hundred per cent probability of cellular damage when you are exposed to radiation. The body can repair some, but there is always residual damage. Whether or not you care about it depends on how severe it is and what you take as a starting point. Right now they are counting only fatal cancer. You are told that low doses of radiation can't be measured. Analysis of cancer deaths in children in the US during the aboveground nuclear testing period from the late forties to the sixties shows a startling increase in childhood cancers between the age of zero and five. They respond to radiation doses in utero. The rates are now coming down, but have not yet returned to the level before the testing started. Downwind of a test-sight is even worse. We are talking here about hundreds of babies. Anything that can cause death by leukemia is going to cause a lot of other effects in children. For every child with leukemia, about 100 others have changes in their blood. The most remarkable thing was that no one complained or protested. But they didn't know. Each woman and man who lost a child, thought it was a personal tragedy and didn't connect it with the weapon testing. But the analysis states that two out of three child deaths were unnecessary. Deaths of newborn babies There are other public health dangers from "normal" radiation. I am talking about normally operating nuclear power plants, not accidents. We have analyzed the death rate of babies of less than 2,500 grams near nuclear power plants in the state of Wisconsin. Over the first five years of normal operation of the nuclear reactors there were a hundred excess infant deaths. Again nobody was complaining or marching in the streets--because each one was a "family tragedy." In fact I went back and visited the hospitals and the doctors knew that their child death rate was going up. But they did not look outside the hospital for reasons. They were bringing in experts to look at their intensive infant care unit, and they were sending their nurses out to learn how to care for babies. So the nurses were being blamed! If it is not the nurses, it is the mothers to be blamed when there is a deformed child. But these deaths don't count in the ordinary risk/benefit calculations, because these babies don't die of cancer. So we are into an insane system of what counts. There are other infants who survive, but who live with disabilities. If we look at miscarriages the same thing holds true. You damage the sperm cells and ovums and a large number of babies are lost. I worked with the pollution from the nuclear plants at the Love Canal in the States, the only area to be declared a national disaster area for pollution. We had already evacuated a hundred families in the center of the pollution. During the following winter they were deciding whether or not to evacuate the people in the outer circle. Of ten babies born in that period in this outer ring only one was normal. And that was the pregnancies that came to term, there were a lot of miscarriages. This should show the vulnerability of the human race. If we don't survive none of the rest of this planet is going to be worth anything. Marshall Islands: Experiment on human beings Let me tell you about the Marshall Islands. On 1 March 1954 they set off the first hydrogen bomb on the Bikini Islands. The bomb represented 1,000 Hiroshima bombs! The island of Rongelap got the fallout of the bomb. This was actually a very deliberate experiment on human beings. That bomb was set off and the people downwind were not evacuated. They wanted quite deliberately to find out what would happen if the population "only" got the fallout and no blast effect, like they did in Hiroshima. They finally evacuated the people after 72 hours and gave them medical care. Three years later they said the island was now inhabitable, it fitted within the "permissible level of radiation." They not only moved back the "fallout" population, but sent a matched control group back to find out how these people would survive the residual radiation. They were sent to live on a contaminated land, which was within "the permissible level." By the way, this level is the same one that you used in Norway for the Tsjernobyl fallout. An analysis of the children from the control group shows that the white blood cells were destroyed. That might not seem important to you, but the white blood cells are the ones that help you fight diseases. The children had epidemics of polio, lepracy and tuberculosis. Epidemic diseases occur everywhere where there have been radiation accidents. I have now moved from what causes cancer to what disrupts your blood system. If we based our regulations on what disrupts your blood system, the permissible level of radiation would drop dramatically. How many becquerels in the reindeer would be permissible if it was based on whether or not your blood was affected? Then that number would drop dramatically. What we are saying now is that: well, the Sami people are eating it, the rest of us can get something else to eat, so we don't bother. We leave the regulation at a level that kills people, that destroys pregnancies. Evidence: the Kerala Community The scientists of the establishment claim that we don't have any evidence that humans suffer genetic effects from radiation. This is based on the fact that they didn't see any genetic effects after Hiroshima. But there are large populations that have been exposed to radiation over generations that they could look at if they wanted. A recently concluded health survey reveals that more disabled and sub-normal children are born to mothers exposed to higher natural background radiation. There is an area an in Kerala in India, where there is naturally occuring thorium monozite sand, a kind of black sand. There are 44,000 people living there, many for generations. Over the last two years we have collected information on illness among the families living on this radioactive sand compared with families living on natural sand in the same area. What we found on the radioactive soil was four times the expected level of Down's Syndrome or mongoloid children. Also mental retardation, epilepsy, congenital blindness and deafness, cleft lip and cleft palate, skeletal abnormalities and childless couples. When I hear about family planning, given what I know about the Marshall Islanders, the downwinders of the Nevada Test Site, and the Kerala Community, I feel like fighting for the right to have children and the right to have normal children. Because this is taken away - also in a much more subtle way. The University of Florida has measured sperm rates in men for the last 25 years in the US. It used to be 1 in 25 males in the US who were infertile. Now it is one in five. 20 per cent of the men in the US are now unable to have children. This is another human right that is being violated. What can we do? How can we get out of this situation? I started by saying there is a risk/benefit trade-off. One of the simplest, but most resisted things to do, is to separate out the function of calculating the risks from that of calculating the benefits. You should strengthen your public health sector. The doctors don't know what the risks of radiation are. They use statistics produced by the nuclear industry to tell what the risks are. Your Health Department is still dealing with the plague, they are not dealing with environmental health problems--and they have to, or else we will not survive. Focus on risks you care about, like long term chronic diseases, like undermining immune systems, like producing disabled children and miscarriages. We don't have to wait until we have an epidemic of cancer deaths. We can move way back and look at more sensitive health indicators--and stop before we get to an ecological disaster. -- At some point or other if we survive, there's going to have to be a massive non-cooperation with our society which is producing death. . . . And if we are ever to break out of the militaristic society that we live in--and that *is* what I think is our basic aim, because that's what distorting every- thing--it's going to have to be through an across-the-board non-cooperation effort. -- Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Vancouver, 1986