Steve Milloy looks at the latest report saying "no safe dose of radiation".
For the sake of being able to somehow characterize low-level radiation exposures as a risk, the panel simply assumed that because high-level exposures to radiation increase risk of health effects — like the slightly elevated cancer risk observed in the atomic bomb survivors — then any level of radiation exposure is a cancer risk.
In effect, they assume a "linear, non-threshold model" (LNT model) for effects of radiation exposure. They assume that zero radiation exposure results in zero (radiation-induced) cancers, and the measured exposures in Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bomb survivors results in some known number of extra cancers.
Then they draw a line between that number at that high exposure, and zero at zero. One percent of that high exposure therefore results in one percent of the number of extra cancers. One one-millionth of that exposure yields one-millionth of that number of extra cancers.
And so on.
They assume.
So what's wrong with that?
The assumption may well be garbage.
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Even if it's not garbage, sensible policy weighs the cost of preventing each additional cancer against the cost savings resulting from not having that cancer develop. This includes not only the cost of treatment, but also the value of additional years of life for every person who doesn't die of cancer, and the value of the enhanced quality of life due to not having to deal with a cancer diagnosis.
These costs are not without limit. Even people who blandly state that the value of a human life is without limit still have definite limits on how much they're willing to spend to preserve even their own lives. (At the very least, they're limited by how much they have to spend.)
But there's no assurance that the LNT model is even right.
As far back as 1980, articles have been written by one T. D. Luckey on the subject of "radiation hormesis". In at least a couple of review articles, he has collected data that shows that small doses of radiation may yield better health than zero doses. The exact mechanism is far from clear, but the fact seems to be that health improves as you increase radiation exposure from zero to a fairly small level, and only starts to drop off later on.
This is not terribly unreasonable. Any number of living things have a range of conditions in which they thrive, and they are less healthy as you get away from that ideal level. Take temperature, for example. Put a lab rat in an oven at 2000°F, and it will die in moments. Therefore, by the LNT model, a lab rat in an oven at zero temperature should live forever.
Even when LNT works for one specific disease, there's more to the life of an organism than one disease. If a low level of radiation promotes health through some mechanism that saturates at a low exposure, it may still produce a beneficial result that outweighs the slight increase in the one measured disease condition at that exposure.
Unfortunately, Milloy goes off in a slightly weird direction.
It was first noticed about a century ago that cancer cells exhibit "aneuploidy" — they don’t have the correct number of chromosomes. Aneuploidy occurs when cells divide improperly and a daughter cell winds up with an extra chromosome. An aneuploid cell may die, but it may also survive and repeat the error, perhaps eventually leading to cancer.
I find I can't remember any mention of all cancers exhibiting aneuploidy. I recall a mention of a single case of cancer with a visible chromosome abnormality, but that was an exceptional case. I'm sure some cancers exhibit aneuploidy, but I never got the impression that it was a general case. And since most microbiologists know now to count, I have my doubts about people having missed this fact for this long.
So where does this idea come from?
The problem with this idea is not so much scientific as political. Bethell points out that the man who “rediscovered” the old work on aneuploidy is controversial University of California-Berkeley researcher and National Academy of Sciences member Peter Duesberg, who famously had his grants from the National Institutes of Health cut-off for being critical of the direction of AIDS research in the late-1980s.
Aha! That would be a problem.
As near as I can tell, Duesberg's notions about AIDS are a perfect fit with the data – but only as long as you work with the subset of data he has assembled. When you look at all the data, you find the theory that HIV causes AIDS is remarkably robust.
At the very most, Duesberg may have found some cases of AIDS that were caused by some other mechanism, acting at a very low level in the population. An effect that exists at only a very low level is likely to be lost in statistical noise, assuming it doesn't happen to be statistical noise.
If Duesberg's technique of ignoring data that doesn't fit his thesis is not confined to AIDS, then I can see why people might want to wait for solid evidence from another quarter before spending time examining any thesis Duesberg comes up with.
As is the case with excessive regulation of radiation exposure, or with any other life-saving or health-promoting measure, you have to look at the costs and the benefits. In the case of research, or anything where the outcome is uncertain, you have to look at probabilities and expected values.
If you have a dollar to spend on a safety measure, do you spend it to avert something that has one chance in a million of killing you, or something else with one chance in a hundred-thousand of killing you? All things being equal, you avert the thing that has the greater chance of killing you.
If you have a dollar to bet with, do you buy the lottery ticket with one chance in 10 million of paying you a million dollars, or the ticket with one chance in 100 million of paying you a million dollars. Another no-brainer.
It's not always that simple, but:
Duesberg still isn’t getting any NIH money even though his aneuploidy idea has survived early challenges, according to Bethell’s article, and the older notions of cancer development are going nowhere fast.
Are they? Maybe, maybe not. I haven't followed the research for quite some time, so I don't know what is, or is not happening.
It seems that before regulators spend another $1 trillion of the public’s money on radiation protection that may be based on faulty assumptions, someone ought to throw some research money Duesberg’s way.
OK, "someone" certainly can. Every person has the right to give money to whatever research he or she sees fit, as long as the research doesn't violate certain laws. If Bill Gates, or even Steve Milloy, believes this lottery ticket has good odds of winning, they're invited to invest as much as they like in it.
For those who have problems with Duesberg's track record – OK granted. "Past history is no guarantee of future performance." But it's all we get to go on.
1 comment:
You are a Duesberg denialist - the professor may be wrong on Aids but he asked good questions 10 years ago and he is still asking good questions now, on HIV/AIDS and on Cancer. There is allot of politics in science but a good question is a contribution to it.
Even the professor’s worst enemies concede that he is a gifted researcher. To deny him research funds because the questions he asks disrupt the “neat” HIV=AIDS truth is a shame.
In biology nothing is neat, there are bell curves everywhere, and things evolve. To say that sex will expose you to HIV and if you test + you will die in 5-10 years is neat, straight forward and false. 20 years on there are many people who have not died [even without ‘life saving’ drugs], who were once sero-positive positive and reverted to negative, who were constantly exposed and were never infected. It is said that these are rare occurrences but I wonder who would know? What epidemiological research is so complete that it could calculate the true incidence of these cases?
The Mayo clinic determined that the boost in T-cells experienced by HIV + people given retroviral therapy is actually due to a side effect of the drugs on the thymus, and not because the virus was inhibited. So now they will use these drugs as immune boosters for cancer therapy. So, viral repression in HIV+ people does not cause an increase in T-cells. You can treat the immunodeficiency without targeting the virus. Now that’s a concept that seems to me does not follow the "it’s the virus stupid" approach to treatment.
An injection drug user, a promiscuous homosexual who takes semen and other fluids from hundreds of people over time and consumes plenty of recreational drugs will both progress to AIDS at the same general rate as a person who has good health habits. That is one of the things I just can’t accept, but it is dogma. At the same time there are studies that point to stress, and vitamin nutrition as influencing the time to progression. Strange!
Only 1 in 500 – 5000 T cells are ever infected – this is a problem even to mainstream HIV researchers. T-cells die off in terminal AIDS even if they are TH-8 which are never infected. These are all problems unexplained to date. They do not point to Duesberg being correct, just to the fact that the story is not complete, not by a long shot.
Then there is the whole African thing. I was told that the epidemiologist there is different from the West because it’s a different virus: HIV-2. Then it turns out the HIV-2 is only endemic in a small part of Africa, the rest, most have HIV-1. So what explains that in Africa its hetero and in the West is drug/homo? I have not read any good explanation for this. Then there is the whole thing about diagnosis based on symptoms and signs because nobody can afford a test and there being solid WHO estimates of prevalence? Also, even orthodox researchers admit the tuberculosis +/HIV- people in Africa can end up in the HIV+ statistics there! Something is wrong.
As you can see I am not a Duesberg denialist, just a Duesberg watcher – there is allot more to both AIDS and Cancer out there, and I will follow over the next two decades to see were the chips fall. The sun cannot be covered by a finger for ever – the truth will be self evident eventually. It is hardier than politics.
Saludos,
Duesberg watcher.
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