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Truth emerging on health ill effects of low levels of ionising radiation

Radiation Alert: Niagara Falls , The Palestine Telegraph, June 21,  – By Paul Zimmerman and Louis Ricciuti, “…….In the last half century, numerous incidents have testified to the hazard to health from low levels of internal emitters, radionuclides absorbed from nuclear pollution in the environment which undergo radioactive decay while sequestered within the human body’s interior. In many cases, injury was incurred from levels of exposure significantly below what the radiation protection agencies consider the threshold for radiation-induced illness.

In the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986, governments throughout Europe chose to uphold the myth that human generated radioactivity released into the environment produced no negative health effects. Consequently, they failed to advise their citizens to take simple precautions that would have protected them from the fallout. Warnings were never issued to avoid consuming meat or diary produced from grazing animals or drinking water drawn from surface sources. By such dereliction of responsibility, illness was produced in the population by levels of radiation declared by the radiation protection community to be safe and “below regulatory concern.”

For instances, independent studies conducted in Scotland, Wales, Greece, Germany and the United States confirmed that infants born during the 18-month period following the accident suffered increased rates of leukemia in their first year of life compared to children born prior to the accident or to those born subsequent to the accident after the level of possible maternal contamination had sufficiently diminished [7].

Chernobyl also produced an elevated incidence for a variety of birth defects in women whose doses were 1/50 the threshold dose for genetic injuries predicted from the study of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [8]. For many years, the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency maintained that only 31 people died as a result of the Chernobyl accident. When this position became untenable, the figure was adjusted to approximately 4,000. However, the most recent research estimates the true number to be closer to 985,000 [9].
Illness induced by low-levels of internal emitters is not restricted to the environmental contamination produced by Chernobyl. Children living in proximity to nuclear installations exhibit elevated rates of leukemia. This was demonstrated in a review of 17 studies which covered 136 nuclear sites in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United States [10]. The authors of the review found that depending on the distance of the child’s home to the nuclear facility, the death rates from leukemia for children up to the age of nine were elevated between five and twenty-four percent. For children and adults aged zero to twenty-five, increased death rates ranged between two to eighteen percent. In the US, women living in counties downwind of nuclear power plants suffer higher rates of breast cancer than women dwelling in counties upwind of the installations…. ….

Radiation Alert: Niagara Falls

June 22, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, health | antinuclear, cancer, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear weapons, radiation, radioactive, uranium