This is for all you panic-mongers.
Rick Cromack here, momentarily interrupting my self-imposed exile to draw attention to a recent point-by-point refutation of certain, purportedly "scientific" allegations regarding a so-called "statistically significant" "spike" in infant mortality in CERTAIN Pacific Northwest municipalities during the ten-week period immediately following the commencement of radiological emissions from Fukushima.
These reports managed to scare the Hell out of not a few BRAWM Forum consumers, fuelled by ever-yet-more-paranoid Rantings by doomsday cheerleaders, Apocalypse whores and Armageddon pimps desperate for attention, despite very early critical analyses casting doubt on the methodology and motives of the study's authors. I have returned today in a final effort to restore some measure of sanity to this conversation.
No less an authority than Scientific American -- not exactly an example of corporate stoogedom -- has completed their review of these allegations, and found them wanting. You can read their conclusions here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=are-babies-dying-in-t...
Maybe this will shake some of the squirrels out of their trees -- unless they remain committed to their search for ever-increasing levels of nuts.
I won't be responding to anyone's posts, BTW, so don't waste your time trying to draw me out. You certainly won't be wasting mine.
Rick Cromack.
Allen, Texas
I bet you are the hypocrite
I bet you are the hypocrite bumping the forum etiquette thread. Coward? That's the best you can do? Weak sauce.
Nope. I'm not bumping that
Nope. I'm not bumping that thread. I'm reading the news and arguing with your flawed accusations. Whatever you have against Rick is unwarranted. You are attacking a genuinely nice guy and it makes you look like a real A-hole. In my opinion his comment is directed at people who are most affected by the flawed and terrifying notion that somehow this event will increase the chances of our children dying. Can't you see how irresponsible that article is? Can you imagine how crappy it would be if you were expecting a baby and the doctor refused to acknowledge that there is an increased risk of birth defects and miscarriage because the risk is too small to consider AND on top of all that some jerks decide to profit off it and spam the internet with faulty statistics under the header "BABY DEATHS"? Fifty percent of the people that frequent this forum do so because they are afraid for the health of someone they love (usually a child) and the other fifty percent are here to spam the forum with scare tactics and traffic direction to one blog or another.
Sorry , you are misinformed.
Sorry , you are misinformed. You have to scroll down to see the article.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06172011.html
This is from a post a little further down this page.
"if u read original post on this issue you would see there was a discussion with information gained and counterpunch may have read this forum topic and saw the discrepancies and investigated further the new data is more striking .it needs study .The OP has missed a lot."
That is how science works.
It would be irresponsible to keep the initial results secret. Would you like them to wait for the final CDC numbers (a year away)? Seems like this is a lot more irrelevant after a year.
I have read a lot on this and nowhere have I seen anyone say these are conclusive results, this forum included. All of these reports end with a statement like, we don't know this could be just a blip but because of the Chernobyl data we need to keep researching because it might be something more.
How can an expectant parent argue with that?
I have two kids and I can assure you I would have wanted this research done and I still want it done. Sorry if the data is too scary for you guys you could always tune out and go back to American Idol or whatever if it bothers you that much that there may be an increase in the infant deaths.
actually
The original post that started all this was called "Fukushima fallout caused significant increase in baby deaths" which is pretty sensational. And although there was a ? at the end the first line of the post was, "That's the question being asked in Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?" So, now it's not just a "significant" increase, it's a "dramatic" increase, all in a matter of words. Now, that's inflation!
For the record there has been NO proven, increase in baby deaths, here or in Japan or anyplace else for that matter. Some cities appear to have data that supports further close examination and continued monitoring, is all. But the original post treated it more like a FACT or at least a foregone conclusion which is hugely irresponsible.
Imho the OP of this thread was being far less sensationalistic when he drew attention to the Scientific American story.
"Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of F
"For the record there has been NO proven, increase in baby deaths"
The theory of gravitation hasn't been proven either, could we debate that next? Please, please, please.
Who said it had been proven? The headline that you misquoted was
"Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html
This entire headline is too long for the subject line on this site. You can try it for yourself.
There was a question mark.
The OP in the other thread did not treat it as a fact.
? = question
You are dishonest.
I seriously doubt it
...but, I don't think it matters, he's already said he's done with the Forum. Let's move on.
I've had several
I've had several conversations with rick each lasted a couple hours. He seemed legit to me.
Yay!
Yay!
Rick has offered me a lot of
Rick has offered me a lot of advice as well. I am always glad to read a post.
Thank you, Rick. I have
Thank you, Rick. I have missed your level headedness and posts.
Mandi
Why didn't they include the
Why didn't they include the data from the counterpunch story Friday?
The SA article was dated today.
Evacuation & Shelter in place
.
No doubt the fetal demise statistics for JAPAN will be very ugly in 2011. Some of the expected increase will be due to radionuclide intake and a portioncan be attributed to an increase in irradiation. The earthquake, tsunami and evacuations have directly contributed to the morbidity. There will likely be spikes in other suspected causes such as influenza and other ‘crowding’ diseases.
The USA evacuated a 50 mile radius around Fukushima. The US military evacuated military dependants from the country. These were prudent decisions to avoid 1) Acute Radiation Sickness, 2) cancer and 3) other radiation related maladies.
In my humble opinion, the data suggests that these evacuations will prove sufficient for item 1) above. A much broader response was justified to reduce items 2) and 3). A nationwide, 2-week, ‘shelter in place’ advisory should have been adopted for the USA. Particulate facemasks should have been provided to the population. Outside school activities should have been curtailed. Public service announcements should have been published and broadcast. Non-essential outdoor activities should have been cautioned against.
So there will be an inevitable USA cancer spike 2) and an unfortunate, but interesting spike in category 3).
Anyone that reviews fetal mortality statistics or works with the families; is aware of the tragic scatter. Regular, large die-offs are not rare and generally, no one seems to have a clue why.
OK, but can we find out the causes of death?
For the sake of argument, let's say there was a statistically-important increase. What would be valuable to know is a breakdown of the causes of death.
This will not be easily gathered. But it would be good to know if some/many were due to things that could be radiation related, perhaps pneumonia? thyroid problems? ???
That would not conclusively prove everything, but would increase our understanding.
"When the complete data are
"When the complete data are published by CDC – which may take a year or more – we'll be able to see what the predominant causes of the elevated infant deaths were, by specific mortality cause. Lots more work can and should be done with these Pacific Northwest cities to investigate whether Fukushima can be causally related to the spike in American infant mortality. One promising area is to correlate these cities' infant death results with contemporaneous measurements of radiation levels in the drinking water and possibly the milk supplies in nearby areas. "
From the post down the page.
cause of death stats may not show the obvious
Re cause of death after radiation exposures, an interesting factoid I gleaned from the NYAS book on Chernobyl (don't believe the nonsense you read about this book in various mainstream media sources, it has much good stuff in even if you decide to discount some aspects) is that a common cause of death that upticked after the radiation was heart disease. No one expected this.
In other words, radiation related deaths may not be primarily thyroid cancer or other things we'd expect.
A separate confounding factor is that quite often, children and adults made ill by radiation will actually die of some common infectious disease, like pneumonia. Then the cause of death gets written down as pneumonia. This is a common way of diddling data here in Europe, where I have seen many people with terminal cancers have "pneumonia" written on the death certificate because that was what finally carried them off. It affects the accuracy of the cancer stats and makes epidemiological research on, say, nuke plants or landfill sites harder to conduct.
It would be interesting to
It would be interesting to see if there were any increases in infant mortality in the US or other neighboring countries after Chernobyl occurred. Surely there is some data on this.
I think most of us have a healthy fear of this...mothers especially. I come to this site to educate myself on this so that I can protect my family as best I can in the midst of no news or severely played down news, misinformation, lack of testing and monitoring, etc. I can weed through the extremes...but what I cannot wrap my head around is the lack of info and protection provided to the public both in Japan and here in the US. Sad.
You can check the Yablokov
You can check the Yablokov report on Chernobyl. Is available on line.
Thank you. I will try to.
Thank you. I will try to.
SA got it wrong-o!
Post-Fukushima Infant Deaths in the Pacific Northwest
Last weekend on this site we ran a piece by Dr. Janet Sherman and Joseph Mangano, reviewing some recent figures from the Center for Disease Control: here's how they interpreted the data in the context of the disaster at Fukishima on March 11, 2011:
"The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:
"4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)?10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week).
"This amounts to an increase of 35 per cent (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3 per cent ), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster…
"Spewing from the Fukushima reactor are radioactive isotopes including those of iodine (I-131), strontium (Sr-90) and cesium (Cs-134 and Cs-137) all of which are taken up in food and water. Iodine is concentrated in the thyroid, Sr-90 in bones and teeth and Cs-134 and Cs-137 in soft tissues, including the heart. The unborn and babies are more vulnerable because the cells are rapidly dividing and the delivered dose is proportionally larger than that delivered to an adult."
Sherman and Mangano's selection of data came under challenge from one CounterPunch reader surmising that they had cherry-picked the data to confirm their prior conclusion from Chernobyl data, namely that radiation releases cause an almost immediate peak in infant mortality. The Chernobyl data appear certainly appear to buttress this idea. (Sherman was the editor of the New York Academy of Sciences compilation of epidemiologic papers from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus on the health effects following the Chenobyl disaster, establishing huge rates of disease and mortality.)
A second reader taxed Sherman and Mangano with failing to provide mortality rates instead of the raw deaths per week they used in their article.
We asked Pierre Sprey, CounterPunch's statistical consultant, to take a look for us at Sherman and Mangano's piece and their use of the CDC figures. The CDC data available, as used by Sherman and Mangano, consist of weekly reports of deaths of infants of one year or less, by city, for 122 selected cities across the U.S. This is the only available data base where one can almost immediately get some numbers bearing on very recent mortality trends -- available one week after the week in which the deaths occurred. Provision of more extensive data takes a year or more, so for analysis of current important health trends this is a very valuable source.
Of course death rates cannot be calculated from this data base because no numbers are published for the underlying population of infants less than one year, city by city – so it's impossible to get rates per thousand. Sherman and Mangano, as did Sprey, looked only at deaths per week, which inherently assumes that each city's population of infants less than one year doesn't vary enormously from week to week or even from year to year – a reasonable assumption – and in any case numbers of deaths are all that are available immediately.
Sprey reviewed the data and confirmed that if you accept the sample cities that Sherman and Mangano picked, and also if you accept comparing 4 weeks before the March 11 Fukushima disaster and 10 weeks afterwards, then Sherman and Mangano's calculations are valid.
One of the CounterPunch critics pointed out that using four weeks before and ten weeks afterwards "looked like cherry-picking the data." To overcome this potential bias, Sprey collated the death numbers for the ten week period before, then did the calculations comparing infant deaths for ten weeks before and ten weeks afterwards for the same eight cities. His result was a statistically insignificant difference in deaths per week before and after– an increase of infant deaths of only 2.4 per cent. To further guard against the possibility of some seasonal effect due to comparing a period earlier in the spring with one later in the spring, Sprey also compared the ten weeks after Fukishima with the identical weeks in 2010. He found exactly the same result: a 2.4 per cent increase in infant deaths over the prior year which, given 128 deaths in the ten week sample, is entirely insignificant statistically.
But then Sprey went further and looked at the Sherman/Mangano selection of eight cities from the 122 reporting to CDC: the eight were Berkeley, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Seattle and Boisie. Apparently, they selected Pacific Coast cities that were more or less within 500 miles of the coast and north of Santa Cruz. However their selection did not include all CDC cities within this categorization, because they left out Tacoma and Spokane, thus leaving themselves open to suspicions of cherry-picking cities.
So Sprey included Tacoma and Spokane in the data set he reviewed in order to be geographically complete. When Sherman and Mangano's overall selection of cities failed to produce a significant result for ten weeks before and ten weeks after March 11, 2011 (as well for the ten equivalent weeks in 2010 as compared with the same weeks in 2011) Sprey elected to look at smaller, geographically consistent groupings of cities. The results were striking.
Simply by moving the boundary line northward from Santa Cruz Sprey found that the four northernmost Pacific Northwest cities in the CDC sample – Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane – show remarkably significant results – a larger infant mortality increase than the original Sherman-Mangano results.
During the ten weeks before March 11 those four cities suffered 55 deaths among infants less than one year old. In the ten weeks after Fukushima 78 infants died – a 42 per cent increase and one that is statistically significant. To confirm once again that these results were not due to seasonality Sprey compared these infant deaths in the ten weeks after Fukushima to the deaths in the equivalent ten weeks a year earlier. The results were almost identical with the ten weeks before Fukushima in 2011. Within the equivalent ten weeks of 2010 53 infants died in these four cities.
The post-Fukushima deaths are 47 per cent higher than they were in the same period a year before – once again statistically significant. If you add Boisie, Idaho to the four city sample the results remain almost unchanged.
Looking a little more closely at the time trend of the infant deaths after Fukushima, Sprey found that the most dramatic increases in deaths were in the two weeks right after the March 11 disaster. Those two weeks saw a near tripling of weekly deaths, followed by a period of somewhat elevated weekly deaths lasting for about five weeks – roughly 25 per over the pre-March 11 rate, then settling down close to the average pre-Fukushima death rate for the last three weeks of the ten week period post-disaster. These results are necessarily approximate because the weekly sample of deaths is too small for precise statistical conclusions.
This geographic concentration of radiation effects in the northernmost Pacific coast area is, in a sense, to be expected
because radiation plumes, like pollution plumes and ash plumes, do not disperse uniformly with distance, contrary to the equations used by all atmospheric computer modelers. To the contrary, actual observations of radiation dispersal after Chernobyl, or volcanic dispersal after any notable eruption, including the recent Icelandic eruptions, always show that the particles disperse in unpredictable and quite concentrated plumes which touch down occasionally and with high concentration at great distances from the source.
When the complete data are published by CDC – which may take a year or more – we'll be able to see what the predominant causes of the elevated infant deaths were, by specific mortality cause. Lots more work can and should be done with these Pacific Northwest cities to investigate whether Fukushima can be causally related to the spike in American infant mortality. One promising area is to correlate these cities' infant death results with contemporaneous measurements of radiation levels in the drinking water and possibly the milk supplies in nearby areas.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06172011.html
Thanks to the commenter on the Scientific American article for pointing this out!!!
Anti science/
This knew data in counterpunch above is tragic and if all u can do is react with some crapy post venting you are sorry.when if u read original post on this issue you would see there was a discussion with information gained and counterpunch may have read this forum topic and saw the discrepancies and investigated further the new data is more striking .it needs study .The OP has missed a lot.
Right on Tdm. All this anti
Right on Tdm.
All this anti fear mongering (without real fear mongering happening in the first place) to me is a form of fear mongering. It's become an ad homonym and it's been thrown around way too much. It stifles debate and causes people to miss important info like this just to write it off as /mongering.
"All this anti fear
"All this anti fear mongering...to me is form of fear mongering"
That's just ridiculous enough a statement to earn you a permanent column here at The Forum At the End of the Universe! Nicely done.
"Ad homonym", ad nauseam
Some of you people who love to engage in personal attacks to justify your increasingly strident fear-mongering are pretty fond of throwing the phrase, "ad homonym attacks" around, I imagine in an effort to sound better-educated. To quote The Princess Bride: 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'
Fortunately, you reveal your true nature and your true intellect pretty much at the same time. I would advise others here to please consider the source when reading your vile swill.
Call me Inigo.
You are correct I meant to
You are correct I meant to type "ad nauseam" had a brain fart and typed "ad homonym" I spelled it wrong too teacher.
Ironically you used this as on opportunity to show us exactly what an ad hominem attack looks like.
An ad hominem (Latin: "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to link the truth of a claim to a negative characteristic or belief of the person advocating it.[1] The ad hominem is normally described as a logical fallacy,[2] but it is not always fallacious; in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue.[3
Abusive ad hominem (also called personal abuse or personal attacks) usually involves insulting or belittling one's opponent in order to attack his claim or invalidate his argument, but can also involve pointing out factual but apparent character flaws or actions that are irrelevant to the opponent's argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions.
example:"Jeff's argument on LeBron James' failures in the NBA finals aren't worth reading, everyone knows he is a "LeBron" hater."
source :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Oh, well, here's another:
Oh, well, here's another: Maybe you can cut 'n paste a degree, perhaps even an honorary doctorate in Oriental noodles, from Wikipedia also. It may look nice on your wall next to that other "degree" in "high school diploma" from the University of Phoenix or the Muncie Stenography School or the Academy of Silly Walks or wherever you sent away to.
Oh and btw, you might want to get your story straight. You were clearly going for 'ad hominem', not 'ad nauseam', in your earlier 'contribution'. Since neither spelling nor thinking seem to be your strong suits, you might want to consider a career change.
Distracto
Yes you are right instead of talking about the important issues raised I would rather trade attacks and argue semantics with you. Because the only reason I'm here posting here is to distract from the poison that we have all been eating, drinking, and breathing since March 11 with no end is sight. You win this one.
I am just a stupid rube with no degree. You are so much better than me. Oh I am so sorry McCormak got scared by that bad old subject line.
as an objective outsider,
as an objective outsider, I'd say you won this debate. I don't know who either one of you are, but what a common tactic used in forum debates: one party side tracks into personal attacks on the others spelling, which inevitably leads to more presumptions about the person's education, etc. and further insults. C'mon! Who gives a you know what! We are dealing with serious issues here, and tensions run high. Let's keep insults out of it. We're in this together, esp considering more possible problems re: another eq off Honsu today, and potential for problems re: midwest flooding and nuke plants.
two out of three ain't bad...
Agreed: You are, and I am.
But if you're going to malign the man, at least get his name right. Here, Let me help you: C-r-o-m-a-c-k. And I believe he said he was leaving b/c of all you conspiracy hacks, fouling up the works with all their baloney.
But if you want to claim credit for running him off, knock yourself out pal. Maybe some time soon you'll have this place all to yourself which is probably your goal anyway right?
We license children to drive... why not, then, to speak?
Can you please be more
Can you please be more mature. We're all a bit stressed over everything right now, but we're in this together.
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately"
Cheers Inigo!
Cheers Inigo!
Scientific American? Was
Scientific American? Was the weekly reader not available?
Apparently, only the tech
Apparently, only the tech editor of scientific American. Also a UCB grad I believe.
"This is not to say that the
"This is not to say that the radiation from Fukushima is not dangerous (it is), nor that we shouldn’t closely monitor its potential to spread (we should). But picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics. Beware those who would confuse the latter with the former."
Thanks for sharing the article Rick.
Scientific American also
Scientific American also defends the sexual mutilation of baby boys.
okay
ok rick I am glad you will not be posting anymore you are a raging boar at times or shall I say bore, ho hum.
scientific american as this poster admits has some issues, with human mutilation.
"scientific american as this
"scientific american as this poster admits has some issues, with human mutilation"
What kind of argumentation is this?