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Comment by tranquilzen | Hacker News Reader

> [..about Fukushima..] "Radiation exposure may have shortened the lives of some of those directly involved, but its effects are likely to be so small that we may never know for sure whether they are related to the accident or not."

I think this author has not realized (nor been informed) what an unmitigated disaster Fukushima really is. The media is downplaying its effects, and so is the author of this article.

How about listening to Helen Caldicott who is an MD and pediatrician, and deeply knowledgeable about the scientific and real-world effects of radiation exposure. Listen to her talk about the children of Fukushima and other places where people have been subjected to radiation. I think our fear of radiation may not be irrational at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qX-YU4nq-g

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Not very convincing. In the first two minutes, she has already committed the fallacy of touting a change in relative risk while glossing over the fact that it is tiny in absolute terms.

She says -- correctly -- that a CT scan during pregnancy doubles the risk of leukemia. But another way to say the same thing is that it increases the lifetime risk from 0.0005% to 0.0011%. Compared with all of the other acceptable risks we choose to take every day, it is very far down the list of things that are worth worrying about.

And yet she chose to lead off with that particular fact. Which is proof to me that she's not actually sticking to the hard science, and more interested in telling scary stories.

If you can get the the same diagnosis without a CT, then wouldn't it be better to skip the known risk in the first place?

Of course, just like if you could avoid ever driving in a car it would be better to skip that known -- and much bigger -- risk. Practical limitations apply.

While an MD and pediatrician may be knowledable about these things, I'd trust the information far more if it was in a paper format or a conference talk than in YouTube video format. I'm not going to spend an hour watching something that has such a high chance of being drivel, without more supporting information that lends it credibility.

"The media is downplaying its effects,"

I have to admit that if I have to choose between "the media is playing up the disaster, it's not as bad as they make it sound" and "the media is pooh-poohing the disaster and it's way worse than they're making it sound", you've got a huge uphill battle to convince me of the latter. Especially in radiological matters.

The media is basically paid to play up the disaster. It's through a couple other steps, of course (pay-per-eyeball is a terrible model for generating truth), but that's the net of it.

"How about listening to Helen Caldicott who is an MD and pediatrician"

That would be the same one who (absurdly) claimed that the space shuttle had destroyed 10% of the earth's ozone layer?

The only thing she's "deeply knowledgeable" about is how to incite panic.

...has everyone forgotten the 20,000 people who died in the tsunami? What's the opportunity cost with the $300 billion that will be used to rebuild the devastated areas? And yet we've got no deaths from Fukushima. How many other deaths would we have suffered from a natural disaster, if it were a large enough event to have caused a bigger problem at Fukushima to cause one hundred radiation related deaths?

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