Europe’s increase in Downs syndrome births due to Chernobyl radiation
Evidence for an increase in trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) in Europe after the Chernobyl reactor accident.http://push-zb.helmholtz-muenchen.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=7180&la=de Genet. Epidemiol. 36, 48-55 (2012) The objective of this study is to investigate the prevalence of Down syndrome (DS) associated with Chernobyl fallout.
Maternal age-adjusted DS data and corresponding live birth data from the following seven European countries or regions were analyzed: Bavaria and West Berlin in Germany, Belarus, Hungary, the Lothian Region of Scotland, North West England, and Sweden from 1981 to 1992.
To assess the underlying time trends in the DS occurrence, and to investigate whether there have been significant changes in the trend functions after Chernobyl, we applied logistic regression allowing for peaks and jumps from January 1987 onward.
The majority of the trisomy 21 cases of the previously reported, highly significant January 1987 clusters in Belarus and West Berlin were conceived when the radioactive clouds with significant amounts of radionuclides with short physical
half-lives, especially (131) iodine, passed over these regions. Apart from this, we also observed a significant longer lasting effect in both areas.
Moreover, evidence for long-term changes in the DS prevalence in several other European regions is presented and
explained by exposure, especially to (137) Cs. In many areas, (137) Cs uptake reached its maximum one year after the Chernobyl accident. Thus, the highest increase in trisomy 21 should be observed in 1987/1988, which is indeed the case.
Based on the fact that maternal meiosis is an error prone process, the assumption of a causal relationship between low-dose irradiation and nondisjunction is the most likely explanation for the observed increase in DS after the Chernobyl reactor accident.
Nuclear tests’ radiation caused fewer girl births, world wide
The 1960s and ’70s increase is attributed in the study to the global dispersal of radioactive atoms from atmospheric atomic bomb tests. The tests lofted radioactive atoms high into the atmosphere, where air currents caught the atoms and then dispersed them around the planet.
The new study is “the most convincing documentation” to date that radiation can lead to sex bias in humans, according to geneticist Karl Sperling of the Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics in Berlin.
The findings challenge the conventional belief that exposure to nuclear radiation has no, or negligible, genetic effects in humans,
Millions Fewer Girls Born Due to Nuclear Radiation? “Unexpected” findings suggest bomb tests, plant accidents boosted male births Ker Than National Geographic News June 2, 2011 Nuclear radiation from bomb tests and power plant accidents causes slightly more boys than girls to be born, a new study suggests. While effects were seen to be regional for incidents on the ground, like Chernobyl, atmospheric blasts were found to affect birth rates on a global scale. Continue reading
Chinese news reports increased exposure to radioactivity as one cause of birth defects
Consumption of prohibited medicine, increased exposure to radioactivity and drinking have also contributed to the increase, experts said.
900,000 Chinese born with birth defects every year http://www.beijingnews.net/index.php?sid/209107845/scat/55582c89cb296d4c/ht/900000-Chinese-born-with-birth-defects-every-year Beijing News.Net 12th September, 2012 Around 900,000 babies are born with birth defects in China every year, the health ministry said Wednesday.
This constitutes about 5.6 percent of the total number of newborns, Xinhua reported.
The ministry report for 2012 on prevention and treatment of defects in newborn babies said birth defects — at 19.1 percent — have become the second-biggest cause of infant deaths in China.
Birth defects are a serious problem in China’s rural areas. Continue reading
Japan Times: “Alarming estimate of cancer fatalities… 1 million extra deaths” — Nobody mentions krypton and xenon that poured from Fukushima plant, says Gundersen — 2-3 times greater than Chernobyl http://enenews.com/japan-times-nobody-mentions-cancer-causing-krypton-and-xenon-that-poured-from-fukushima-plant-says-gundersen-2-3-times-greater-than-chernobyl
September 15th, 2012
By ENENews Title: ‘The government could still save lives’
Source: The Japan Times Online
Author: DAVID MCNEILL
Date: Sep. 16, 2012
[…]
Experts waved away fears about radiation, cabinet ministers scoffed at comparisons to Chernobyl, and the word “meltdown” itself was effectively scoured from the media.
Some observers, however, were quick to hit the panic button. One of the best known was U.S. antinuclear campaigner Arnie Gundersen, who predicted that the disaster would lead to 1 million extra deaths from cancer.
[…]
Gundersen, a nuclear engineer, says [the official release amount is] an underestimate. He puts the release of cesium at about half that of Chernobyl, and says little attention has been paid to radioactive gases, Xenon and Krypton, which poured out of the No. 1 plant in quantities “two to three times” greater than the 1986 Ukraine meltdown. He is sticking to his original alarming estimate of cancer fatalities.
[…]
Gundersen bases much of his assessment of Fukushima on what he learned from America’s worst nuclear accident, the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. As an expert witness during the probe that followed, Gundersen said the official estimate of radioactive releases there was also much too low. “You have to remember, we don’t know how much radiation was released. It’s guys like me who have to calculate it.” His assessment upped the official radiation figure for the accident by five times. “I’m dead sure that’s too low,” he says, adding that he believes the true figure could be 15 times higher than the industry estimate.
[…]
He cites the work of Steve Wing, an epidemiologist who says he has tracked 10,000 extra deaths from lung cancer in the first six to seven years after the accident.
“The same gases (Xenon and Krypton) that caused those cancers leaked out of the containment vessel at the Daiichi (No. 1) plant,” he says. “Nobody is talking about it.” He says the gases quickly disperse and are notoriously hard to measure. Other emissions are more straightforward. Plutonium is heavy and does not widely disperse. Cesium is relatively easy to track.
[…]
Japan’s radiation standards relaxed following lobbying by nuclear power companies
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster – Public Health Lessons and Challenges
“Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan has successfully lobbied radiation specialists including ICRP members and the Nuclear Safety Commission to relax radiation standards.”
—
FEPC has covered travel costs for ICRP members
to attend international conferences through the
Radiation Effects Association….
Conclusions
The health risks posed by radiation are not
limited to cancer.
There is risk of cancer even at levels less than 100mSv.
There is both theoretical and epidemiological evidence
for this.
The risk is purported to be an unknown. Is this to maintain
the power of MEXT, METI, and the utilities in order to
promote nuclear power?…
CITIZENS’ RESPONSES IPPNW public mee.ng, 27 August 2012, Tokyo
HOSOKAWA Komei(細川弘明), k22m@me.com
Takagi Fund for Ci.zen Science / Asia-Pacific Resource
Center / Greenpeace Japan / Kyoto Seika University http://fukushimasymposium.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/e382abe38390e383bceng.pdf
Radiation exposure to Fukushima workers before the March 11 catastrophe
Journalist who covered Fukushima Daiichi: I heard stories that tens of people at plant may have died from radiation exposure before 3/11 (VIDEO) http://enenews.com/journalist-covered-fukushima-daiichi-heard-stories-tens-people-plant-died-radiation-exposure-before-311-video “TEPCO and the Fukushima Forbidden Zone”, by Matsumura & Onda Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan Feb 28, 2012
Katsunobu Onda, Journalist: As was explained earlier, I have a 35 year relationship with nuclear power plants.
My first opportunity I had to study nuclear power plants was 35 years ago when I visited the Daiichi Fukushima nuclear power plant that was run by Tepco.
And the reason that I went was that, as you may know inside the power plants facilities themselves there are many, many, many people that work at a the plant…
And I had heard stories that several people, or maybe several tens of people, had died from their exposure to radiation.
Truth about health effects of low dose radiation is now coming out
From Nuclear Information and Resource Service, 13 Sept 12, The debate on the effects of low-dose radiation, confined until the first decade of the 21st century to narrow circles in which a few independent scientists stood opposed to national and international specialized nuclear energy agencies (among others the International Commission on Radiation Protection or ICRP and the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA), entered the public arena by way of three recent events, events which made it clear that the reference model for effects of ionizing radiation on health was beginning to be called into question.
The first of these, in 1999, was the sudden interruption of the research work of Yuri Bendazhevsky, and his arrest and imprisonment for “activities threatening state security”.
The event provoked an international movement of support and call for his release, which paradoxically gave world visibility to his research results—results that contradict the optimistic appraisals of the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident published by international organizations.
The nuclear industry understands the impact of nuclear disasters to be the effect of a single event like an explosion of a reactor. Only those who die or are effected during that time frame are categorized as attributable to the disaster.
However, other scientists, citing fundamental scientific knowledge about the genesis of cancer, understand the disease as a multi-stage process. If not merely external irradiation but also internal contamination at the level of a given organ is taken into account as relevant to the cancer process, it becomes necessary to attend to the effects of two types of exposure: extremely brief exposure of the entire body – termed acute exposure – and extremely low doses from point sources that hit very near target organs over a long period of time – chronic exposure -but vary in terms of internal movements and whether the organism responds by retaining or purging itself of inhaled or ingested radioactive particles.
This video does a great job of explaining the different sides to the argument. Which side do you believe?
http://vimeo.com/33724891
Text citation: http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/philosophy/images/pdf/Paul_JOBIN/ThebaudMony-PrefaceEnglishEd.pdf
Ethics and medical radiation
John Gofman on medical x rays. http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/john-gofman-on-medical-x-rays/ 10 Spt 12,
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/OHofJWGforDOE/
An Interview with John Gofman, “Benefits of Radiation Therapy and Ethics”.
GOURLEY: Now, one thing confuses me terribly about all this, and I’m not a scientist and I’m new on this: You, yourself, said that [there are] medical benefits in certain cases and certain specific cancers and that sort of thing. How does the line fall between where it can be therapeutic, [and] where it’s harmful?
GOFMAN: Line falls at one point. I have no difficulty with radiation therapy being beneficial in certain situations. I have no difficulty with diagnostic radiation, finding something important out [from] a diagnosis that can [save] a person’s life.
GOURLEY: Which diagnosis are you speaking of here?
GOFMAN: You can talk about the possibility of pneumonia that’s not appreciated or some mass in the abdomen or something like a cardiac lesion. I have never in my life said people should not have an x ray. I have never argued against radiation therapy. I talked to you earlier about some places where I participated in radiation therapy and I know people were benefited.
GOURLEY: Right.
GOFMAN: That is a world apart from what your problem is in this whole thing. Where I stand on it is, you voluntarily, you accept a risk for a benefit to you or your child or your mother or father if you discussed it with them. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s when somebody says you shall be allowed to get x units of radiation as a member of the public without any benefit to you: “Society will benefit.”
That’s immoral, it’s illegal, and it’s being done every day. I just think it’s just illegal and it’s a violation of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a violation of Constitutional rights and none of the medical ethicists are saying a goddamn thing about. I’m very critical of medical ethicists for that.’ http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/OHofJWGforDOE/
Increased breast cancer risk from X rays, mammograms, for some women
X-ray, mammogram radiation may increase breast cancer risk for some
women http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/19482704/x-ray-mammogram-radiation-may-increase-breast-cancer-risk-for-some-women Sep 07, 2012 Exposure to radiation is an established risk factor for breast cancer among all women, the study authors pointed out. – Women with certain gene mutations are more likely to develop breast cancer if they were exposed to radiation from chest X-rays or mammograms before age 30, compared with those who have the gene mutations and weren’t exposed to radiation, new research suggests. Continue reading
Savannah River nuclear site – killer radiation and coverup
Race and Radiation: The Equal Opportunity Killer at the Savannah River Site DC Bureau By Joseph Trento, September 6th, 2012 “……The multiple lawsuits and harsh criticism of its practices have not seemed to stop some at SRS. …..
While some SRS management discriminates against black workers, the reality is everyone in the region – regardless of color – have been misled about the dangers at the Site. South Carolina and Georgia politicians used the conservative and patriotic culture to make sure the health effects at SRS received no serious monitoring.
The local hospitals and doctors did not establish tumor registries, and local physicians never spoke out about the effects of the plant on workers and residents. Like any other company town, Aiken and the surrounding communities did not dare challenge a federal government agency that provided high-paying jobs and enriched the communities with contributions and donations…..
with the money came unspoken danger. Unannounced radiation releases into the air exposed children to the most toxic nuclear materials on a regular basis during the 1950s and 1960s. Local officials and residents made no effort to ask questions about what went on at SRS. As a result, today SRS is the most radioactively contaminated single site in the world. Though a Superfund Site, the EPA has no legal power to stop the National Nuclear Security Administration from creating more high-level nuclear waste. The NNSA continues to amass more high-level waste every day at SRS. Since the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility was abandoned, SRS has become the de facto high-level nuclear waste dump for the United States.
In recent weeks, the DOE-appointed Citizens Advisory Board that does “outside environmental monitoring” at the Site has shown signs of abandoning its traditional DOE rubber stamp role and began asking hard questions that had been reserved for environmental critics of SRS. The reality that radioactivity cannot be mitigated, just segregated and stored for the thousands of years it takes to decay, makes the entire Savannah River Site and the communities near it what former DOE official Robert Alvarez says is “a national sacrifice zone.”
Even South Carolina area political officials who have run for office again and again on the vast amounts of federal aid and contractor monies they enjoy are beginning to understand that the state’s reputation as a retirement haven may be less attractive if future retirees are reluctant to purchase homes adjoining the largest high-level waste nuclear dump site in the United States. The increased publicity and wariness toward SRS is making retirement and second homes from Aiken to Hilton Head less appealing.
As the troubled history of SRS becomes more personal to people in the surrounding communities, the acceptance of DOE’s continued pollution may become politically untenable.
“We were basically revisiting what transpired 46 years ago and yet this story is still being told again and it’s still a tragic story,” Richard Lindsay said. “The same elements are there. These are human beings whose lives are being affected and yet there are other people who seem to be indifferent to it. Sometimes I just get a sense that people don’t get it.” http://www.dcbureau.org/201209067618/national-security-news-service/race-and-radiation-the-equal-opportunity-killer-at-the-savannah-river-site.html
No radiation dose records kept for over 3,000 Fukushima cleanup workers
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Over 3,000 workers at Fukushima Daiichi have no dosimetry records
http://enformable.com/2012/09/over-3000-workers-at-fukushima-daiichi-have-no-dosimetry-records/ 5 Sept 12, Some 3,077 workers at TEPCO’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have no records of the radiation levels that they may have been exposed to during the first 3 weeks of the nuclear disaster. These workers were dispatched in work groups, with only representatives of the entire group wearing dosimeters.
Earlier this summer, it was discovered that other workers had covered their dosimeters with lead shields to lower their recorded radiation exposures in order to not exceed the national limits. Source: JiJi Press
Nuclear weapons scientists – studied by anthropologist
Designed for Death Guernica , Helen Caldicott interviews Hugh Gusterson September 4, 2012 As we grapple with the legal, political, and cultural implications of drone warfare and targeted killing, the renowned anthropologist draws on an older turning point in military ethics—weapons design at Los Alamos…
…. . A pioneer in the anthropology of science and current professor at George Mason University, Gusterson has studied the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists in the United Sates and Russia. He is a vocal critic of government recruitment of anthropologists in counterinsurgency projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.
The following interview is excerpted from the forthcoming Loving This Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World, a collection of transcripts from the weekly radio program of physician-turned-activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. …. . A pioneer in the anthropology of science and current professor at George Mason University, Gusterson has studied the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists in the United Sates and Russia. He is a vocal critic of government recruitment of anthropologists in counterinsurgency projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.
The following interview is excerpted from the forthcoming Loving This Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World, a collection of transcripts from the weekly radio program of physician-turned-activist Dr. Helen Caldicott. ….
Hugh Gusterson: There are two nuclear weapons labs: one is Los Alamos, which developed the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the other is Lawrence Livermore in San Francisco, which was established in 1952. I have done extensive fieldwork at both labs….I vividly remember one weapons scientist telling me that he could never work on conventional weapons, because it would be immoral. He felt much more comfortable working on nuclear weapons, because he was convinced that nuclear weapons would never be used. I was very struck that he felt morally cleaner working on weapons that could destroy a city than he would have felt working on napalm….. most of the weapons scientists didn’t see much conflict between Christianity and designing weapons of mass destruction, and they were quite sure the weapons would never be used……
Hugh Gusterson: They also talk about missiles being connected to the outside world by umbilical cords. The very first bomb tested was referred to as Oppenheimer’s baby. The one dropped on Hiroshima was Little Boy. So there is this language of metaphors of birth that surrounds this bomb enterprise. They talk about the results of radioactive decay processes as being daughter products. So there is this language of fertility and birth….. The language of death is banished from the world of nuclear weapons scientists; they don’t talk about killing people; they talk about collateral damage. People are not incinerated; they’re always carbonized—anesthetizing language from which death is banished. But there’s this very rich set of metaphors about birth. I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t an attempt on their part to say, We’re really about life, we’re not about killing people. Which you can see as a form of denial…..
As an anthropologist, I find it particularly offensive when you talk to weapons scientists, or to other kinds of nuclear weapons professionals, that there’s a uniform assumption that Americans are the only people who can be uniquely trusted with nuclear weapons in a way that black and brown people, non-Christians in particular, cannot. You hear it said that only Americans and Europeans have the strength required of people to have nuclear weapons. This flies in the face of the evidence, since the United States is the only country ever to abuse weapons….. http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/designed-for-death/
The true scale of Chernobyl’s radioactive disaster

Chernobyl, Insight from the Inside by Vladimir M.
Chernousenko, Scientific Director of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute of Physics in Kiev’s Task Force for the Rectification of the Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident
Foreward, pp. XVI-XVII, From the Publisher:
The author’s chief motivation for writing this book is that he considers it vitally important that the world should be told the unvarnished truth about the scale and consequences of the disaster, the legacy of which will remain with us for many generations. He presents realistic estimates and new unpublished hard data from various reliable sources about the radiation pollution caused by the accident. The figures prove to be much higher than anyone dared assume up to now. We are confronted with horrendous numbers regarding the radiation pollution of the soil and aquifers in the Soviet Union. On the basis of these data, it is estimated that a territory of a least 100,000 km^2 is so polluted as to be uninhabitable. There are even estimates of an amount three times as high.
The author’s greatest concern is the well-being of the people still living in this huge territory. Many of those who are still living in the polluted areas want to leave, but the problems posed by local administration and bureaucracy do not allow them to do so. For lack of precedence, the effects on their health in the long-term can only be guessed at, at the present time. But those effects are already beginning to become evident. The health statistics included in this book are a matter of serious concern and urgently call for further investigations. Continue reading
Chernobyl’s children better protected than Fukushima’s: Japan’s health catastrophe
Although thyroid cancer is highly treatable and is operable, this level of exposure for Fukushima’s children is nothing short of catastrophic. There is a scientific consensus that at least 4,000 excess cancer deaths occurred in the wake of Chernobyl’ (a consensus, by the way, not shared by the nuclear industry–surprise!), but careful epidemiologicalstudies sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists estimate as many as 25,000 excess cancer deaths.
the health threat of Fukushima, even with these shocking thyroid results known, is being systematically underplayed in the business press.
The thing is, there has been a consistent downplaying the likely health effects of the Fukushima accident and an over-hyping of nuclear power’s “green” energy profile
FUKUSHIMA–WORSE THAN CHERNOBYL’ FOR KIDS The Paltry Sapien, by Matthew Payne July 21, 2012 The shocking results of the latest epidemiological studies are in from Fukushima and they are not good. As summarized by Michael Kelly at Business Insider, the report indicates:
Of more than 38,000 children tested from the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, 36 percent have abnormal growths – cysts or nodules – on their thyroids a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as reported by ENENews.
This is startling. The Chernobyl meltdown threw much more atmospheric contamination out but has had a much slower progression in poisoning its local children–only about 1.74 percent of tested children in the test area around Chernobyl’ had thyroid nodules five to ten years after the nuclear catastrophe! How to explain this much higher virulence of radiation contamination in Japan? Well, first, they received a very high dose of radiation–mostly radioactive iodine isotopes. This was to be expected given prevailing wind patterns and the reason why the US NRC advised American nationals to evacuate to a distance of 50 miles, not the 20 to 30kilometers implemented by the Japanese government. That zone was not based on the clear computing modeling available to the Japanese government and it is hard to come to any other conclusion than that the government balked at evacuating the major city of Fukushima in the wake of the tsunami’s chaos. Frankly, even an evacuation zone of fifty miles was inadequate–ENENews has uncovered three children (4, 7, and 10) from one family with pre-cancerous cysts on their thyroids sixty miles from Fukushima Daiichi. Continue reading
Every minute of every day – radiation exposure to Fukushima’s children
He didn’t answer my question about the fuel rods melted out did he?”
No he did not answer that question. ( The molten fuel is still molten, and large amounts of it has leaked through the holes in the base of the pressure vessles. As of September 2011, TEPCO still cannot accurately measure the amount of water in the reactors, the levels have been recently found to be very low and the water keeps leaking from the holes in the bottom of the damaged reactor pressure vessels.
On completion of “Step 2″ in their road map, the government scrapped the 20km exclusion zone, “welcoming back” women and children.
…most will come back because the government is making false promises. They have no where else to go
“Our government is still telling us that there is no immediate effect on health. Also it is telling us that it will be safe to come back and live in Fukushima within one or two years after the clean up work is done. Children in Fukushima are the most victimized by these government lies. Children in Fukushima are being exposed to radiation everyday and every minute of the day. Only 10% of 300,000 children living in Fukushima Prefecture have evacuated. “
Evacuate Fukushima 福島の子供を守れ Part 07 – DAYS OF INFAMY http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/evacuate-fukushima-%E7%A6%8F%E5%B3%B6%E3%81%AE%E5%AD%90%E4%BE%9B%E3%82%92%E5%AE%88%E3%82%8C-part-07-days-of-infamy/
The Japanese government decides to return all evacuees within 20 km of Fukushima Diiachi …going deeper into the history books 30 September 2011 will also mention this Day of Infamy. When an entire nation abandoned its children at the hands of a Nuclear Mafia that purchased the souls of the very young ones that were supposed to protect them. Continue reading
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