FIRST: DO NO HARM BEING “CAUTIOUS” ABOUT RADIATION IS KILLING PEOPLE

摘要

Hippocrates warned physicians, “First: Do no harm!” He did not think that doctors would intentionally harm their patients. On the contrary, he was concerned that cautious doctors might pursue a particular health objective with such focused zeal that they fail to see that the patient is being harmed by other effects of the treatment. It’s not lack of heart he’s addressing, it’s lack of perspective. You can try so hard to avoid one problem that you back right into another. You can, despite your best intentions, hurt the one you love. That is what we’re doing with radiation protection. To avoid doing harm, we must evaluate the cost of presuming that even sub-ambient doses of radiation are harmful. Defenders of this premise concede that “few experimental studies and essentially no human data, can be said to prove, or even provide direct support, for the concept” (NCRP-121). And there is a vast body of credible scientific evidence that flatly contradicts it. The evidence shows that low-dose radiation is not harmful, and can in fact be beneficial. This evidence has never been refuted. Policy-makers and advisors just dismiss it, with the argument that “we want to be cautious.” But that is not a proper way to deal with reports written by credible scientists, published in peer-reviewed, mainstream journals that reach unequivocal conclusions that flatly contradict existing policy. Such reports should be openly and honestly evaluated by knowledgeable scientists with no conflict of interest. If it is judged that the reports’ conclusions are not valid, the detailed rationale for so concluding must be spelled out and disseminated for review by the scientific community at large. By ignoring this evidence and continually building unwarranted fear of radiation, we scare people away from life-saving medical procedures, pollution-free electricity generation, and many valuable commercial and industrial uses of radiation. It’s time to look at the scientific evidence. Since the radiation protection community has not been willing to do this, RSH and others have taken the issue to court, charging that the US Environmental Protection Agency, in its latest rule that sets zero goals for each radioisotope, has been arbitrary and capricious in not basing its rule on “the best peer-reviewed scientific data,” as required by law.