One reporter's notebook
One surprising lesson from radiation -- don't believe everything you believe ...
Radiation is bad, right?
Everyone knows that radiation is dangerous. It killed thousands after the atom bomb. People get cancer from it. We tightly control nuclear reactors for that very reason. You can find a paper on my Web site telling of the dangers of nuclear fallout to the people of Southern Utah, who lived downwind from the open-air tests at the Nevada Test Site.
A new study is calling into question all of that received wisdom. And that it hasn't been reported anywhere in the press - at least nowhere that I see -- is, itself, a story worth noting.
The story begins in 1983. Somehow, the recycled steel used in the construction of more than 180 buildings - including apartments in which 10,000 people lived - was contaminated by cobalt-60, which is radioactive. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that people began to uncover what seemed to be a grave mistake. A team of 14 researchers, led by W.L. Chen, the director of the department of medical radiation technology at the National Yang-Ming University, published their findings in Spring 2004 in the “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.”
Their findings were nothing short of stunning. It is obviously unethical to submit a population of people to something you think is harmful - such as radiation - so relatively few studies have looked at the effects of radiation at low doses over a long period. This seeming accident, obviously, was a profound opportunity to study these effects over a long duration. See the full article here. It is the first one in the Journal.
What the researchers found was that low-level radiation may actually prevent cancer. The people who lived in these apartments - some for up to 20 years -- had a rate of cancer that was not half, not a fourth but less than 3 percent of the normal population. That is, for every 100 cancer deaths in the normal population, there were fewer than 3 in this group. Furthermore, the rate of spontaneous birth defects - another grave fear of radiation - was less than one-tenth that of the overall population in Taiwan.
For me, this passes any definition of news of which I know. It is unusual, new (by scientific standards) and has great human interest. But my search of Lexis-Nexis reveals no stories about this study anywhere in the United States.
The conspiratorial-minded might argue that this shows the bias of a left-wing media tied into environmental ideologies, unwilling to see benefits of nuclear power. I am sometimes conspiratorial-minded, but not really here. True, as reporters get sources, they do sometimes find people who think like them. More likely, however, this oversight in the media comes from professional norms in science reporting. Science media in this country rely on four or five leading journals and follow discussions at the National Academy of Sciences as their main sources. Local journalists look to their local universities to see what they are studying. From these publications and institutions comes much of the scientific discussion in our media.
This was from a less-significant journal and came from a university outside the United States, so it is outside the regular beats of reporters.
The lesson here, if there is to be one, for me is about reporting. It is always good reporting to challenge the conventional wisdom. The conventional challenges lie often right under our noses. Recognizing how we think about anything so simple as radiation shows the breadth of stories available to reporters who will just look and who are willing to be challenged. It also shows that great stories are out there for those willing to just get off the beaten track occasionally.
Of course, my views should not be construed to represent anything other than my own views. They are NOT necessarily the views of my department, my university or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring institution of my university.