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1,000 staff at Sellafield nuclear facility self-isolating amid pandemic

March 21, 2020 Posted by | health, UK | Leave a comment

The Virus Is Teaching Everyone What Runaway Growth Really Means

The Virus Is Teaching Everyone What Runaway Growth Really Means

To make sense of the spread of Covid-19, economics—particularly black swan events and compound growth—can provide guidance. Bloomberg, By Gernot Wagner, March 20, 2020, Compound growth is relentless. Investors know that all too well: Start saving early, and even low annual growth rates will eventually yield big results.

Black swan events, too, are relentless. The existence of low-probability, high-impact events, in fact, is a powerful explanation for the long-standing “equity premium puzzle,” why equities on average return so much more than bonds and make compound growth all the more powerful.

Climate change is beset with both. I’ve spent a decade trying to explain that to anyone who’ll listen. It’s not levels; it’s growth rates. It’s not what we know— though that’s bad enough—it’s largely about the unknowns and perhaps unknowables.

Black swans need no explanation in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Compound growth, alas, still does—or at least it did for much too long into the current crisis.

Witnessing the rapid changes in attitudes has been more than educational, to put it mildly. Watching the Trump administration—and, by extension, Fox News—turn 180 degrees almost overnight might be particularly jarring. But this time, even oft-rational leaders were caught off guard. French President Emmanuel Macron went to the theater on Friday, March 6, demonstrating normalcy. The following Tuesday, his culture minister tested positive for the virus. A week later, Macron ordered a complete shutdown of the country. ……

The first question one must ask when looking at any benefit-cost analysis is where it might be so wrong as to overturn the original results. For climate, it’s clear that standard benefit-cost calculations lead to an underestimate of the true cost of each ton of carbon dioxide emitted. Benefits of mitigation are typically higher than calculated, while cost estimates often turn out to be lower than assumed.

For Covid-19, the uncertainties also seem to point in one and only one direction: toward shutting down sooner rather than later. Given that the benefits of shutting down today include include avoiding a later shutdown, it’s hard to see how any of the many other uncertainties could dwarf the relentless compound growth of infections of roughly 33% per day.

It’s exactly this insight that reportedly convinced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—belatedly—to pursue strong mitigation measures as well. The original U.K. strategy of “herd immunity,” after all, would have implied a significant culling of the herd.

All that points to another significant lesson that applies to the virus as much as to climate and to decision-making more broadly: Your actions inadvertently causing a death (an “error of commission”) might feel worse than the lack of one’s actions leading to that same death (an “error of omission”)  but the end result is the same. Error is error, dead is dead.

With Covid-19, the bias goes toward leaders wanting to avoid doing too much at first, lest they are seen to be causing undue economic pain. Omitting early action, meanwhile, has already proved to cause even more pain later on.

Economist Milton Friedman famously argued how actions taken in a crisis “depend on the ideas that are lying around.” In this crisis, it behooves us not to ignore one of the most powerful of economic ideas: how compound growth, in the end, dwarfs all. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-20/the-virus-is-teaching-everyone-what-runaway-growth-really-means

 

March 21, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, health | Leave a comment

Paul Ehrlich on the pandemic and the challenge to civilisation

Paul R. Ehrlich: A pandemic, planetary reckoning, and a path forward,  Environmental Health News, Mar 20, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing environmental destruction and the deterioration of social and cultural systems into sharp focus. But we can learn from this.

Paul R Ehrlich    In addition to great concern over the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m also disappointed.

For more than half a century, scientists have been expressing concern over the deterioration of what I like to call the “epidemiological environment.” That environment consists of the constellation of circumstances that influence patterns of disease and factors related to health.

It includes such things as population sizes and densities, diets, speed and type of transportation systems, toxics, climate disruption, frequency of human-animal contacts, availability of medical isolation facilities, stockpiles of medicines, vaccines, and medical equipment.

The epidemiological environment also includes cultural norms: levels of education, equity in societies, competence of leadership. Few aspects of the human predicament do not impinge on our epidemiological environment.

My own interest in one part of that environment, transmissible diseases, started as a grad student working on the evolution of DDT resistance in fruit flies. The results of that research had obvious implications for the evolution of antibiotic resistance, a key element in the epidemiological environment.

It clearly influenced my wife Anne and my scenarios in our 1968 book, The Population Bomb and a section on the epidemiological environment in The Population Explosion, the 1990 sequel book. We were responding not just to our own fears, but the fears of colleagues much more knowledgeable in areas like virology and epidemiology.

Of course, the utter failure of global society to deal appropriately with high probability threats to civilization warned of by the scientific community is hardly limited to pandemics.

Climate disruption is the best recognized of contemporary health threats, but the decay of biodiversity, and “updating” the American nuclear triad as part of the Russian-United States’ “mutually assured imbecility” are among the most critical.

Those, at least, are not obvious to the average citizen or decision-maker, but what about others such as increased flows of plastics and toxics (especially synthetic hormone mimicking compounds) into the global environment?

Everyone knows about volumes of plastics in waste streams and oceans and has personal experience with the thermal paper receipts coated with bisphenol-A (BPA), yet little to no remedies have been undertaken.

Indeed, why are there so few effective responses to the epidemics and the maladies of industrial civilization?……….

March 21, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, environment, health | Leave a comment

The vital importance of media accuracy at this critical time

It’s Vitally Important for Media to Get Facts Right in a Life-or-Death Crisis    https://fair.org/home/its-vitally-important-for-media-to-get-facts-right-in-a-life-or-death-crisis/

JIM NAURECKAS MARCH 20, 2020 THE FRONT PAGE of the New York Times (late) print edition for March 20, 2020, bore a large map of the United States, illustrating reported cases of Covid-19 by state and county, as of March 19, 4 p.m. EDT. Readers in the paper’s home city might have been particularly interested in the count for the state of New York—which, according to the map, was up to 5,200+ cases:
Curiously, the morning that paper was delivered, the online version of the map, with the supposedly latest figures, had cases in New York State at 4,100+—1,100 fewer, a reduction of almost 20%—with no explanation for the discrepancy. (Illustrating the exponential growth of the outbreak, by the afternoon of March 20, the online map had 7,100+ cases for New York State.)
I bring this up not because it’s easy to keep track of ever-changing numbers in an epidemic, but because it’s so vital to provide accurate information, particularly about the outbreak’s growth, and especially when you are an outlet that officials and opinion-shapers are likely to look to for guidance when making decisions and recommendations about the drastic measures needed to halt the coronavirus.
A less excusable example of an influential media voice failing to get the story straight was Jennifer Rubin‘s March 18 Washington Post column, which rightfully lambasted President Donald Trump for fatally bungling the response to the pandemic. But in that column, Rubin did her own bungling, writing:
Trump did not show any real recognition of the magnitude of the problem until his administration got hold of a study from Britain. “The Imperial College London group reported that if nothing was done by governments and individuals and the pandemic remained uncontrolled, 510,000 would die in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States over the course of the outbreak,” the Post reports. Even if we now institute uniform, serious measures to mitigate the spread of the virus, we would “reduce mortality by half, to 260,000 people in the United Kingdom and 1.1 million in the United States.”
By Rubin’s account, we’re doomed to a seven-figure casualty toll, no matter what we do. But that is not what the Post news article she’s citing said. Immediately after the passage she quotes—but interrupted by a photograph—the story continues:
Finally, if the British government quickly went all-out to suppress viral spread — aiming to reverse epidemic growth and reduce the case load to a low level — then the number of dead in the country could drop to below 20,000. To do this, the researchers said, Britain would have to enforce social distancing for the entire population, isolate all cases, demand quarantines of entire households where anyone is sick, and close all schools and universities — and do this not for weeks but for 12 to 18 months, until a vaccine is available.
From 260,000 to 20,000 is, obviously, a substantial drop; if the same reduction in deaths is envisioned for the United States, that would bring the toll down below 85,000. To exaggerate the cost in human lives of what your source offers as the best-case scenario by 1,200% is simply irresponsible.
And it should be recognized that her source, the Washington Post news article by William Booth (3/17/20), itself misrepresents the Imperial College study in a crucial way. It did not envision the government going “all-out to suppress viral spread”; you’ll note that its description of proposed actions does not include banning large public gatherings, or shutting down public spaces like restaurants, bars, cinemas and theaters, as New York City announced it would do on March 15. And it certainly does not contemplate all nonessential employees staying home, as one in five Americans had been told to do by March 20. (See FAIR.org, 3/17/20.)
Could these more strenuous interventions reduce the death toll below 85,000? Could they bring hope for a return to a semblance of normalcy sooner than a year or 18 months? It seems likely, but the Post report suggested that the comparatively modest restrictions modeled by the Imperial College are the best we can do.
Given that this study seems to have a profound impact on official crisis planning on both sides of the Atlantic, journalists seem to have had considerable trouble reading and comprehending what it is and isn’t saying. A New York Times article (3/17/20) devoted to the report, by Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, described the relatively gentle virus-fighting steps modeled by the Imperial College as “radical lockdown policies” and “far stricter lockdowns,” though they don’t envision locking down anyone. They were far less sweeping than the shelter-in-place order that had been issued for seven Bay Area counties the day before (Mercury News, 3/16/20).
It is crucial that the public understand that what seems to be the single-most important document guiding official decision-making, and the source for the dismaying projection that coronavirus-related restrictions may have to remain in place as long as 18 months, depends on the unstated assumption that the most vigorous actions taken to fight the epidemic have to allow business to continue as close to usual as possible. In this, the Imperial College, which as its name suggests is very close to the British government, appears to be guided by the same philosophy that informs a remarkable Wall Street Journal editorial (3/19/20):

This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008–2009…. Barring [a quick vaccine], our leaders and our society will very soon need to shift their virus-fighting strategy to something that is sustainable…. America urgently needs a pandemic strategy that is more economically and socially sustainable than the current national lockdown.

In other words, saving lives is all well and good, but we’ve got businesses to run. If that’s the attitude behind the report that underlies the thinking of top US and British officials, citizens need to know that—and they won’t learn it from inaccurate reporting.

March 21, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, health, media | Leave a comment

Destruction of habitats, loss of biodiversity, bring pandemics

 

March 19, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, environment, health | 1 Comment

Nuclear Power Plants: Tritium is a lot more hazardous than they say

tests for statistical significance have been misused in epidemiological studies on cancers near nuclear facilities. These in the past have often concluded that such effects do not occur or they downplayed any effects which did occur. In fact, copious evidence exists throughout the world – over 60 studies – of raised cancer levels near NPPs.

Most (>75%) of these studies found cancer increases but because they were small, their findings were often dismissed as not statistically significant. In other words, they were chucked in the bin marked “not significant” without further consideration.

Just as people were misled about tobacco smoking in previous decades, perhaps we are being misled about raised cancers near NPPs nowadays.

The Hazards of Tritium, Dr Ian Fairlie, March 13, 2020

Summary

Nuclear facilities emit very large amounts of tritium, 3H, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen.  Much evidence from cell/animal studies and radiation biology theory indicates that tritium is more hazardous than gamma rays and most X-rays. However the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) continues to underestimate tritium’s hazard by recommending  a radiation weighting factor (wR) of unity for tritium’s beta particle emissions.  Tritium’s exceptionally high molecular exchange rate with hydrogen atoms on adjacent molecules makes it extremely mobile in the environment. This plus the fact that the most common form of tritium is water, ie radioactive water, means that, when tritium is emitted from nuclear facilities, it rapidly contaminates all biota in adjacent areas. Tritium binds with organic matter to form organically bound tritium (OBT) with long residence times in tissues and organs making it more radiotoxic than tritiated water (HTO). Epidemiology studies indicate increases in cancers and congenital malformations near nuclear facilities. It is recommended that nuclear operators and scientists should be properly informed about tritium’s hazards; that tritium’s safety factors should be strengthened; and that a hazard scheme for common radionuclides be established. Continue reading →

March 19, 2020 Posted by | radiation, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, spinbuster | Leave a comment

Dr Ian Fairlea on Epidemiological Evidence of Cancer Risks

The Hazards of Tritium,https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/the-hazards-of-tritium/ , Dr Ian Fairlie, March 13, 2020   “……….Epidemiological Evidence of Risks Because of methodological limitations, epidemiology studies are a blunt tool for discovering whether adverse effects result from radiation exposures. These limitations include:

  • under-ascertainment, …
  • strict data requirements….
  • confounding factors: the true causes of morbidity or mortality can be uncertain due to confounding factors such as socio-economic status and competing causes of death.
  • bias: ……
  • poor signal to noise…..
  • uncertain doses:……
  • wide confidence intervals……
Many epidemiology studies are ecologic studies, that is, quick inexpensive studies which look at health statistics in tables and notate individual data. Their findings are usually regarded as indicative, but not conclusive. If their findings suggest an adverse effect then these should be investigated further by more detailed cohort or case-control studies. The latter match “cases” (i.e. those with an adverse health effect) with randomly-selected similar individuals without an adverse effect, in order to minimise under-ascertainment. However few of these are actually carried out because of their expense and long time-spans. Sometimes they are not carried out for political reasons because findings of increased cancers are not welcome.
A disconcerting finding is that a substantial number of epi studies near NPPs conclude there are no findings of ill health even though positive increases were in fact observed. That is, the researchers were unable to accept the evidence of their own work. It is difficult to comment on this cognitive dissonance (few studies seem to exist on this phenomenon) but it is apparently often due to unacknowledged biases or to group-think re the impossibility for ill-health effects to exist near nuclear facilities. In their conclusions, such authors have discounted their findings using a variety of reasons ………
However there is a serious problem here. If similarly increased health effects had been observed near, say, a lead smelting factory or an asbestos mine, would they be dismissed by referring to these rationales? I rather doubt it. In other words, what is occurring here is that hidden biases in favour of nuclear power are in play. In my view, such conflicts of bias should be declared at the outset just as conflicts of interest are nowadays.

The Abuse of Statistical Significance Tests

Many epi studies of cancer near NPPs have found increased risks but dismissed them as not “statistically significant”. This wording often misleads lay readers into thinking that a reported increase is unimportant or irrelevant. But, in statistics, the adjective “significant” is a specialist word used to convey a narrow meaning, ie that the likelihood of an observation being a fluke is less than 5% (assuming a p = 5% test were used). It does not mean important or relevant.
Also this phrase is usually employed without explaining that the chosen significance level is quite arbitrary. There is no scientific justification for using a 5% level or any other test level: it is merely a matter of convenience. In other words, it is quite possible for results which are “not significant” when a 5% test is applied, could become “significant” when a 10% or other test level were used.
The existence of this practice has historical parallels. In the 1950s, dozens of health studies financed by tobacco companies acted to sow seeds of doubt about the health effects of cigarette smoking for many years. Continue reading →

March 19, 2020 Posted by | radiation, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, spinbuster | Leave a comment

How dangerous is a coronavirus infection?

Gene Leonard MDCorona 30 Morbitity Mers  18 Mar 20

Do not listen to conspiracy theories or factoids. It is serious. 86 percent of the people, who already heve the virus in the USA, do not know they have it. It can kill babies and toddlers as well. If you value your loved ones hunker down, and help slow down the deadly virus’s transmission.

How dangerous is a coronavirus infection?

Usually coronavirus illnesses are fairly mild, affecting just the upper airway. But the new virus, as well as both SARS and MERS, are different.

Those three types of betacoronaviruses can latch onto proteins studding the outside of lung cells, and penetrate much deeper into the airway than cold-causing coronaviruses, says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, M.D. The 2019 version is “a disease that causes more lung disease than sniffles,” Fauci says.

Damage to the lungs can make the viruses deadly. In 2003 and 2004, SARS killed nearly 10 percent of the 8,096 people in 29 countries who fell ill. A total of 774 people died, according to the World Health Organization.

MERS is even more deadly, claiming about 30 percent of people it infects. Unlike SARS, outbreaks of that virus are still simmering, Fauci says. Since 2012, MERS has caused 2,494 confirmed cases in 27 countries and killed 858 people.

MERS can spread from person to person, and some “superspreaders” have passed the virus on to many others. Most famously, 186 people contracted MERS after one businessman unwittingly brought the virus to South Korea in 2015 and spread it to others. Another superspreader who caught MERS from that man passed the virus to 82 people over just two days while being treated in a hospital

March 18, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, health | 1 Comment

“Military Intelligence?” 30,000 U.S. soldiers to Corona-infested Europe for “war games”

March 17, 2020 Posted by | EUROPE, health, USA | Leave a comment

Tritium – more hazardous than gamma rays and most X-rays

Ian Fairlie 13th March 2020, The Nuclear facilities emit very large amounts of tritium, 3H, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Much evidence from cell/animal studies and radiation biology theory indicates that tritium is more hazardous than gamma rays and most X-rays.

However the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) continues to underestimate tritium’s hazard by recommending a radiation weighting factor (wR) of unity for
tritium’s beta particle emissions. Tritium’s exceptionally high molecular exchange rate with hydrogen atoms on adjacent molecules makes it extremely mobile in the environment.

This plus the fact that the most common form of tritium is water, i.e. radioactive water, means that, when tritium is emitted from nuclear facilities, it rapidly contaminates all biota in adjacent areas. Tritium binds with organic matter to form organically bound tritium (OBT) with long residence times in tissues and organs making it more radiotoxic than tritiated water (HTO).

Epidemiology studies indicate increases in cancers and congenital malformations near
nuclear facilities. It is recommended that nuclear operators and scientists should be properly informed about tritium’s hazards; that tritium’s safety factors should be strengthened; and that a hazard scheme for common radionuclides be established.

https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/the-hazards-of-tritium/

March 16, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

Dr Chris Busby exposes the facts on Cancer in US Navy  Nuclear Powered Ships

They reported the results of their own epidemiology study which they carried out on the Ronald Reagan sailors. This compared the illness yield (including cancers) of the 4,843 RR sailors with a matched control group of 65,269 sailors on nuclear powered ships that were not anywhere near Fukushima.
There were 30% more cancers in the control group after adjusting for age. But what I did was to compare the control group with the National population, using data on cancer rates by age group from the SEER database [3]. The result showed an astonishing 9.2-fold excess of cancer in the sailors on nuclear-powered vessels.

Cancer in US Navy  Nuclear Powered Ships https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/06/cancer-in-us-navy-nuclear-powered-ships/   by CHRIS BUSBY   Here is a good one. In 2011, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was about 100km off the coast of Japan at the time of the Tsunami and the subsequent Fukushima reactor explosions. It was directed by the US government to ride to the rescue in what was later called Operation Tomodachi (friendship)–to provide assistance to the victims of the floods. What no-one on board was told was that the reactors had exploded and a plume of highly radioactive material was blowing east from the site into the path of the vessel. Of course, when this arrived, all the radiation monitors on the boat started screaming, and the planes and helicopters that had flown the rescue sorties were contaminated.

In 2014 I was engaged by some California attorneys to advise on a court case being taken against the Japanese company TEPCO and the US reactor makers GEC on behalf of the sailors who served on the aircraft-carrier. A significant number of the Ronald Reagan crew were reporting a wide range of weird illnesses including cancers, all of which they were attributing to their radiation exposures. Between 2014 and now, the court arguments were all about procedure: whether the cases should be heard in Japan or in the California where the vessel’s home port of San Diego was. There was a lot of publicity [1]. Eventually, and recently, the California judge decided that the case had to be heard in Japan. This is (in passing) monstrously unjust since Japanese law is different and the sailors cannot afford to go to Japan and hire Japanese lawyers. But this is not the story here.

In 2014, following all the publicity about the cancers, a number of US Senators and important people were asking pertinent questions—the Navy had to do something to answer the accusations that the Fukushima radiation was killing those who sailed on Operation Tomodachi. They panicked. A big report was prepared by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), entitled: Final Report to the Congressional Defense Committees in Response to the Joint Explanatory Statement Accompanying the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014, page 90, “Radiation Exposure” [2]. Never use one word when ten will do

This report rambled on about how low the Fukushima doses were, how everyone acted wonderfully and how all the radioactivity was rapidly cleaned up. The dose reconstruction showed no one got more than a fraction of the Natural Background dose and so forth. We have been here regularly. (The methodology for the dose reconstruction has since disappeared from the link given in the report). Since no-one believes any of this dose bullshit any more, to prove that there was no cancer excess, the Navy took one step too far.
They reported the results of their own epidemiology study which they carried out on the Ronald Reagan sailors. This compared the illness yield (including cancers) of the 4,843 RR sailors with a matched control group of 65,269 sailors on nuclear powered ships that were not anywhere near Fukushima. The period of analysis was from 2011 to 2013, about 3 years. This showed that there were more cancers in the control group over that period. The idea clearly was to knock on the head any suggestion that the radiation from Fukushima was the cause of the cancers and other stuff that was the basis of the court case. And this it apparently did.
Their move was to compare the matched “unexposed” control group with the Ronald Reagan group. There were 30% more cancers in the control group after adjusting for age. But what I did was to compare the control group with the National population, using data on cancer rates by age group from the SEER database [3]. The result showed an astonishing 9.2-fold excess of cancer in the sailors on nuclear-powered vessels. There were 121 cancers predicted on the basis of the national rates, and 1119 reported by the DTRA study. For the Reagans it was about 6-fold with 46 reported and 7.76 expected. Now this result is astonishing. I wrote my study up for a good scientific peer reviewed journal, and it was published last week [4]. You can find it on academia.edu if you can’t afford the journal cost.

What I discuss in the paper to explain the result is my usual argument about how the radiation protection legislation is wildly incorrect when dealing with internal contamination from radionuclides. The legal limits in USA and the West are based on the comparison of cancers in those exposed to acute external gamma ray doses to the Japanese A-Bomb populations and cannot apply to internal exposures to substances which target DNA (Uranium, Strontium-90) or which provide huge local ionisation to some living cells but nothing at all to others (DU particles, reactor discharge particles).

But this time it really is a big deal. Nine times the expected rates? What are they going to do? It is their own data which they stupidly released. It shows that all the sailors on nuclear powered Navy ships are dying from cancer. You can bet the telephone lines are hot, and that we won’t see any coverage of this in the Theatre newspapers and media. But the sailors themselves and the veterans? What will they think when they find this online but not reported?
Studies of nuclear workers have been the new battleground for this Chess game since it became apparent in the last few years that the Japanese A-Bomb studies were dishonestly manipulated and ignored internal exposures to fallout and rainout [5]. We have seen a number of attempts to kill the argument about low dose radiation and health using nuclear worker studies. There was the Lancet publication in year 2015 [6]. There was the desperate and disgraceful Royal Society publication last year [7]. The late Alexei Yablokov and I wrote to the Lancet Editor on behalf of the Independent WHO [8] asking if we could point out in the journal that the Lancet articles reassuring everyone that the science of radiation risk was secure were written by nuclear industry scientists and were unsafe. The Lancet refused. I wrote to the Royal Society. They also refused to publish anything. What is Truth—says Pilate—waits for no answer.

Nuclear workers work outside at a nuclear site where the discharges get dispersed. Nuclear sailors live in a tin box that also contains the reactors. Nuclear worker studies are based on data that is provided by the nuclear industry to show there are no cancers. The DTRA study had to show more cancers in order to swamp the Ronald Reagan sailors’ cancers. But to do this, they brought out their Queen. And it was taken

Anyway, let’s not walk further into the What is Truth swamp and discuss the News Theatre. Thankfully this story shows that in this truth argument there are two last frontiers. These are the scientific peer-review literature and the courts. I am representing the widow of a UK nuclear submariner, a man who was a reactor servicing technician and who died from cancer. Let’s see what the Scottish court makes of this paper. Read it yourself and have a laugh. If you are a Navy sailor on a nuclear-powered ship, be very frightened. Write to your Senator. Kick up a fuss.
Join the debate on Facebook
More articles by:CHRIS BUSBY

Dr Chris Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Riskand the author of Uranium and Health – The Health Effects of Exposure to Uranium and Uranium Weapons Fallout (Documents of the ECRR 2010 No 2, Brussels, 2010). For details and current CV see chrisbusbyexposed.org. For accounts of his work see greenaudit.org, llrc.org and nuclearjustice.org.

March 7, 2020 Posted by | health, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | 2 Comments

Japan may have to cancel the Olympics – a “cruise ship on land”

March 7, 2020 Posted by | health, Japan | Leave a comment

Worker at Hinkley Point nuclear station has now developed coronavirus COVID-19

Somerset Live 4th March 2020, A Chinese national who had been working in the UK for months has tested positive for novel coronavirus COVID-19 after travelling back to China. The employee of a Chinese state-owned nuclear company had been working in Somerset for a prolonged period of time until February 27 when he returned to his home country. Upon his return, it was confirmed by the Chinese government that the male was suffering from COVID-19. The man, aged 35, had been working at the EDF Energy-owned Hinkley Point nuclear station near Bridgwater when in the UK. The worker is believed to have taken a Cathay Pacific flight from London to Hong Kong on Thursday, February 27 and then a boat to Shenzhen where he fell unwell and was tested. Information reportedonline by the Chinese government stated the individual had contracted COVID-19 after developing symptoms two days after leaving the UK, and this has now been confirmed by Public Health England today (March 4).

https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/coronavirus-outbreak-somerset-statistics-case-3914315

March 6, 2020 Posted by | health, UK | Leave a comment

Nuclear testing left a signature of radioactive carbon all around the world

When Linus Pauling accepted the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning against hydrogen bombs, he said that carbon 14 “deserves our special concern” because it “shows the extent to which the earth is being changed by the tests of nuclear weapons.”
If people’s teeth have a very low level of radiocarbon, it means that they were born well before Castle Bravo. [thermonuclear atom bomb test] People born in the early 1960s have high levels of radiocarbon in their molars, which develop early, and lower levels in their wisdom teeth, which grow years later. By matching each tooth in a jaw to the bomb curve, forensic scientists can estimate the age of a skeleton to within one or two years.

Even after childhood, bomb radiocarbon chronicles the history of our body.

Your Inner H-Bomb  Nuclear testing left a signature of radioactive carbon all around the world—in trees and sharks, in oceans and human bodies. Even as that signal disappears, it’s revealing new secrets to scientists. The Atlantic, Story by Carl Zimmer, 2 Mar 20, 
“…… Among the isotopes created by a thermonuclear blast is a rare, radioactive version of carbon, called carbon 14. Castle Bravo and the hydrogen-bomb tests that followed it created vast amounts of carbon 14, which have endured ever since. A little of this carbon 14 made its way into Clark’s body, into his blood, his fat, his gut, and his muscles. Clark carried a signature of the nuclear weapons he tested to his grave.
I can state this with confidence, even though I did not carry out an autopsy on Clark. I know this because the carbon 14 produced by hydrogen bombs spread over the entire world. It worked itself into the atmosphere, the oceans, and practically every living thing. As it spread, it exposed secrets. It can reveal when we were born. It tracks hidden changes to our hearts and brains. It lights up the cryptic channels that join the entire biosphere into a single network of chemical flux. This man-made burst of carbon 14 has been such a revelation that scientists refer to it as “the bomb spike.” Only now is the bomb spike close to disappearing, but as it vanishes, scientists have found a new use for it: to track global warming, the next self-inflicted threat to our survival. ……. Continue reading →

March 3, 2020 Posted by | ANTARCTICA, environment, radiation, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Coronavirus – right-wing media reactions and conspiracy theories

A guide to right-wing media reactions and conspiracy theories surrounding coronavirus, MEDIA MATTERS BY KAYLA GOGARTY & COURTNEY HAGLE  RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM NOOR AL-SIBAI, ALEX KAPLAN, NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ & MADELINE PELTZ 02/28/20

  • As the lethal outbreak of coronavirus continues to spread around the world and the U.S. government warns that it will almost certainly also spread within the United States, right-wing media outlets and online accounts are spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories which could have deadly consequences.

    The strain of novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China. It swiftly spread and has now been detected in 53 countries, including the United States. So far, the outbreak has led to nearly 3,000 deaths and more than 82,000 cases worldwide, according to The New York Times.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes the disease behind the current outbreak as part of “a large family of viruses that are common in many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats.” The CDC adds that “rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people.” Earlier patients in the COVID-19 outbreak appeared to have a link to seafood and animal products, but the virus has since been shown to spread person-to-person.

    On January 30, the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” and on January 31, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency in the United States.

    As the impact of coronavirus continued to be reported, concerns began to arise that it was driving xenophobic attacks toward people of Asian descent. In New York City, a man assaulted a woman wearing a face mask while calling her a “diseased b****.” On a Los Angeles subway, one man declared that “every disease has ever came from China.” In another incident, a Costco worker in Washington state told an 8-year-old child to “get away” because she believed he may be “from China.” Across the country, there has been an uptick in physical and verbal attacks toward Asian Americans.

    In addition to xenophobic sentiments, conspiracy theories and agenda-driven narratives began to arise on the internet and throughout right-wing media, adding more panic and confusion to an already chaotic situation. These conspiracy theories include claims that the Chinese government created coronavirus at a lab in Wuhan; that the United States is using the virus to attack and undermine China from within; and that coronavirus was previously created and patented by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.

    The virus has also triggered anti-Semitic sentiments, medical and scientific disinformation, and fearmongering from the religious right about the end of the world. In the United States, President Donald Trump and his allies in right-wing media have also absurdly argued that Democrats and the media are politicizing coronavirus for their own gain to make him look bad and cause panic in the stock market, which has plunged in reaction to the potential pandemic. Continue reading →

March 2, 2020 Posted by | health, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

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