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Post by David B. Benson on Apr 11, 2020 6:05:48 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Apr 14, 2020 6:56:04 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Apr 14, 2020 7:08:19 GMT 9.5
Evidence Supporting Radiation Hormesis in Atomic Bomb Survivor Cancer Mortality Data Mohan Doss 2012 Jul 13 Dose Response www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3526329/#!po=1.47059 Corrected for the 'natural' cancer rate. h/t to engineerpoet |
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Post by huon on Apr 15, 2020 7:18:44 GMT 9.5
How Radiotherapy Was Historically Used To Treat Pneumonia: Could It Be Useful Today? Edward J. Calabrese and Gaurav Dhawan 2013 Dec Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848110/Is low dose radiation therapy a potential treatment for COVID-19 pneumonia? Charles Kirby and Marc Mackenzie 08 Apr 2020 Radiotherapy & Oncology, Letter to the editor www.thegreenjournal.com/article/S0167-8140(20)30185-7/fulltextTwo related articles. UPDATE (3 hours later): Thanks to DBB's input below, I've replaced the problematic Conca article with a letter by Kirby and Mackenzie on the same topic. The Conca article was entitled "Can low doses of radiation raise COVID-19 survival rates?" |
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Post by David B. Benson on Apr 15, 2020 8:24:49 GMT 9.5
Forbes can't find the James Conca article using the link provides by huon. It does not appear to be on his Forbes site at this time.
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Post by huon on Apr 19, 2020 14:14:09 GMT 9.5
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Post by Roger Clifton on Apr 20, 2020 15:35:17 GMT 9.5
[An article describes] How Big Oil, working through the Rockefeller Foundation, helped foist LNT on the scientific community and on the public. would be excellent reading for anyone wanting to learn more about the safe threshold for ionising radiation. Pretty well any toxin has a threshold dose below which it presents no threat to the organism. The article spells out the events where good science identifying the threshold was replaced with a populist fear that the threat was intrinsically evil. That the public was so willing to believe is apparent from the extraordinary popularity of the 1959 movie, " On the Beach". Good Science Fiction, it makes a single tweak to reality, in this case by proposing that nuclear fallout would be totally lethal even if it was diluted throughout the entire atmosphere. Although fiction, it was swallowed as gospel. Even though most of the audience had had an x-ray at some time during their lives without dying from it, the public at large was willing to believe that there is no threshold below which ionising radiation is harmless. Since then, fallout from nuclear tests in the 1960s has spread around the world without a coincident increase in radiation induced cancers. Yet even today, many people believe that nuclear fallout would be worse than climate change. In the 1950s DNA had been shown to be a palette for genetic code, but described as if it were a single molecule surviving throughout the life of the cell. In the popular understanding, the only thing that could break such an important molecule would be unnatural radiation due to artificial radioactivity. Considering the incredible length ascribed to the DNA, it would have to be an impossibly robust molecule to survive all the other biochemical assaults across that lifetime without breaking and being promptly repaired. Scientists searched for the "double-strand break repair mechanism", eventually earning the 2015 Nobel prize for Chemistry. In the light of that research, it seems that the enormously long structure of DNA has thousands of discontinuities and repair functions underway at any one time. Calling DNA a molecule at all is arguable, but we have yet to hear of a different description of it suitable for school textbooks. Ionising radiation is just one of many double-strand breaking stressors that it can recover from – up to some threshold. |
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Post by huon on May 6, 2020 14:37:08 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on May 7, 2020 3:08:22 GMT 9.5
Interesting idea. Makes sense, on first blush: the virus' single-strand DNA (RNA) would be much more sensitive to ionizing radiation - effectively all breaks are the equivalent of double strand breaks (which also serves as example of why a virus can mutate quicker than eukaryotes). In addition, a virus lacks several of the repair/defence mechanisms of eukaryotes. Especially multi cellular organisms which also have cell mitosis as final defence mechanism - not an option for a virus, clearly! Based on UV treatment units' effectiveness in removing viral threats, the idea seems promising. It would probably require a number of treatments in series to be most effective for viral agents inside an organism, though. |
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Post by huon on Jun 16, 2020 14:11:40 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Jun 23, 2020 5:07:46 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Jul 7, 2020 7:34:46 GMT 9.5
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Post by huon on Aug 28, 2020 10:13:55 GMT 9.5
For The First Time, World Learns Truth About Risk Of Nuclear David Watson Aug 14, 2020 Generation Atomic www.generationatomic.org/skim/truth-about-nuclear-riskThe study profiled here, even using a "linear no threshold" assessment of risk, concludes that 5 to 10 times too many people were evacuated after Chernobyl. And after Fukushima, as a response to radiation, no one should have been evacuated. The article concludes: "Rediscovering nuclear as a safe energy source, as well as a green and affordable one, would be revolutionary." (Hat tip to Rod Adams for his tweet on Atomic Insights.) |
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Post by David B. Benson on Nov 12, 2020 13:33:57 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Feb 1, 2021 21:50:42 GMT 9.5
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Post by huon on Feb 9, 2021 7:22:34 GMT 9.5
A Call to Action: "Low-Dose Radiation May Help Cure COVID-19..." [Taps Mic] "..Is This Thing On?" Mohammad K. Kahn, MD, PhD, Clayton B. Hess, MD, MPH Published 19 November 2020 JNCI Cancer Spectrum, Volume 5, February 2021 academic.oup.com/jncics/article/5/1/pkaa105/5991442. Another example of how inordinate fear of radiation may, literally, be scaring us to death. |
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Post by huon on Jul 15, 2021 14:58:41 GMT 9.5
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Post by David B. Benson on Aug 17, 2023 10:44:02 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 17, 2023 21:55:47 GMT 9.5
Very misleading “study”. At under 100 mSv, cancer risk from such tiny doses is hard to detect, as other causes for cancer would swamp the data, creating poor signal to noise. More importantly, it doesn’t consider that total mortality (including cancers) is lower for nuclear workers. They have higher life expectancy than non nuclear workers. So total risk is lower. |
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Post by huon on Aug 20, 2023 14:53:52 GMT 9.5
Thanks, DBB, for bringing this important article to our attention. And thank you, cyrilr, for providing some welcome perspective.
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Post by Roger Clifton on Aug 21, 2023 19:50:34 GMT 9.5
Very misleading “study”. At under 100 mSv, cancer risk from such tiny doses is hard to detect, as other causes for cancer would swamp the data, creating poor signal to noise. If the title sounds like scaremongering, it probably is. The underlying paper is not a proper study "by the nuclear industry", but a worker looking for scary correlations in his employer's data – and he disclaims its authorisation. A proper study would go outside the dosimeter data and measure the known cancer-causing factors – especially smoking. For respectability, the paper would need to have figures that allow intelligent readers to explore other conclusions in the data. Low-dose has been studied and reported professionally in the Low Dose Rad 2018 Conference in Tri-Cities, Washington. Their figures are profuse and allow for intensive study. In particular, they show shouting evidence of thresholds, below which the negative consequences of radiation vanish. These thresholds may be the source of the "steep" correlations the author found in the lowest doses. |
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 3:48:09 GMT 9.5
Thanks Roger, great to hear from you again!
You're probably preaching to the choir here - and so am I - but after endless years of reading endless research on dose response, some commonalities can be easily distilled:
1. Data quality especially in the low dose range is poor. The supposed "gold standard" of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors is absulute sheit in terms of data quality in the lower dose cohorts. Neither the data nor the binning would be accepted by scientific rigor. This is suspicious since large resources were spent on these studies and the conclusions derived are rather strong (ie LNT). When it's noise rather than signal it is time to be honest and say we can't use the low dose data. Cancer just happens a lot and when the dose is low there's not much cancer due to radiation and a lot of cancer due to "normal" causes.
2. Nuclear power industry does not cause much dose. There's tons of shielding by design and then more by operations so even nuclear workers don't get much dose. Dose is measured very accurately using calibrated devices so unlike other industries handling carcinogens we have very good data here.
3. Cancer is an old people's disease. As time goes on we see more cancer incidence. This has nothing to do with radiation and certainly not with nuclear power, which causes little dose even to people working with it.
4. Dose seems almost completely irrelevant. Dose rate seems the only thing that really matters. This is also supported by point number 1. Anything below 2 mSv/day is noise at worst and beneficial at best. This is true even for very high total dose rates - the Co-60 irradited Beagle dogs being an excellent controlled lab experiment.
5. Alarmists and critics don't like controlled lab experiments on animals. They prefer statistical studies on humans that have endless uncontrolled variables that create noise. They then use the noise to claim there's a high risk to humans. They implicitly claim that humans are special and other mammals somehow are not relevant.
6. Alarmists don't like studies that show positive effects. That can't be right, right? Let's ignore those, and only accept the ones (using statistically bogus data) that show negative effects, at high dose rates only. Radiation must be bad for you, so if any study shows positive effects, we reject those, then use the remainder to prove that radiation is bad for you. Circular logic, my dear Watson?
7. Having ignored # 6, let's pretend that dose rate doesn't matter, since we have cherry picked only high dose rate studies of bogus statistical endurance. Sift through the pile and only retain the sheit.
8. Having ignored everything above and using the sheit, let us claim that there is a linear relationship with dose and ignore dose rate.
9. # 8 doesn't add up even on it's own terms, so let's add a bogus correction factor called dose rate correction factor to pretend that dose rate doesn't matter in order to pretend that only total dose matters and the relationship is linear, even by self-admission it just isn't. Yeah the dose rate doesn't matter, but we had to use a dose rate correction factor to make the data work to our bogus model that says so.
10. In case anyone (people with less than half a functioning brain) are not deceived, let us focos on particulars such as solid cancer or leukemia, rather than total mortality (ie life expectancy ie actual risk). We can't talk about total life expectancy/risk because that would undermine our entire argument about there being higher risk, even using the bogus approach taken above.
The inescapable conclusion is that the people involved who push LNT are involved in a deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage. It is just people with ulterior agenda's. There's no real science going on in the "establishment" that maintains the LNT lie.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:12:21 GMT 9.5
Quote from the study:
"The study of Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs serves as the primary basis for the quantitative risk estimates used in radiation protection. Although that study concerns a high dose rate setting, findings from it inform contemporary assessments for low dose and low dose rate radiation exposures."
Translation: the atomic bomb study was all irrelevant high dose rate exposure, but we, professional researchers, all pretend this is relevant to lower dose rate exposures because we can't be bothered to study actual (and available) low dose rate data".
Gee whiz! We have data showing people who drink 100 glasses of alcohol a day showing rather clearly it is bad for you, therefore this informs the risk of people that take half a glass of wine with their dinner! Yah! This is SCIENCE!
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:15:38 GMT 9.5
Another quote from this delightful study:
" INWORKS pools cohorts of nuclear workers monitored with radiation badges in France, the UK, and the US, countries that have assembled some of the largest and most informative cohorts of nuclear workers in the world"
Translation: first we pretend that dose rate doesn't matter, and only total dose matters, and we can't be bothered to distinguish for dose rate despite our excellent database. So instead we bin together large amounts of workers so that this won't be obvious to the casual observer and we can smudge out the data in large cohorts so no one will even ask us about this.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:18:42 GMT 9.5
More quotes:
"INWORKS was established to provide a basis for deriving quantitative estimates of the association between protracted low dose, low dose rate exposure to ionising radiation and mortality. INWORKS builds on the work done for the International Collaborative Study of Cancer Risk among Radiation Workers in the Nuclear Industry by taking advantage of data from the most informative cohorts involved in that study.19 Criteria for selection of the study cohorts included completeness and quality of data, start of facility operations, and exposure primarily to high energy, low linear energy transfer penetrating radiations."
Translation: we pretend to have a rich and sophisticated database to infer risk to low dose rate radiation, but it doesn't actually distinguish between dose rates, and instead lumps in all doses into total doses in cohorts. Just pretend that dose rate was a criteria for distinguishing even though we didn't say it was.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:22:05 GMT 9.5
More quotes from this excellent study:
"We derived individual annual estimates of whole body dose primarily due to external exposure to penetrating radiation in the form of photons from personal occupational exposure monitoring data. Unless otherwise stated, any reference to dose in this paper implies absorbed dose to the colon expressed in gray (Gy). We derived the estimated colon dose to facilitate comparison with analyses of associations between radiation dose and solid cancer done in other major cohorts"
Translation: we couldn't be bothered to look at individual organ dose, so we took the whole yearly body dose, without consideration of dose rates, and guessed what the organ dose would be based on someone else's bogus studies, who of course also did not look at dose rates and whose data quality is not clear, but who cares!
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:26:50 GMT 9.5
My lord this "study" isn't worth the shine on a dog turd. More coming
"The statistical methods used were similar to those used in previous international studies of nuclear workers.18 We quantified radiation dose-mortality associations by using a stratum specific model for mortality rates, Ik, of the form Ik=exp(αk)(1+βZ), where k indexes strata, Z is the cumulative dose in Gy, and β is excess relative rate (the relative rate minus 1) per Gy."
Translation: we made up a bogus correlation hypothesis using math salad - boldly stating that which remains to be proven - and explicitly assume LNT in order to prove that LNT is correct. Conclusion: see hypothesis.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:30:27 GMT 9.5
Boy this stuff really shouldn't be reviewed when sober:
"cumulative doses were restricted to the lower dose range, workers with a positive neutron dose were excluded, workers flagged for internal contamination or monitoring were excluded, and regression model adjustment was made for workers flagged for internal contamination or monitoring. We compared results obtained under alternative lags with respect to goodness of model fit"
Translation: we only looked at the worst signal to noise ratio cohort, we didn't include a bunch of stuff that may be relevant but we didn't like for unexplained reasons, and then we fitted that to our bogus math salad model. Then we compared the bogus results using an arbitrary statistical method for models that has no bearing on whether the model is good or bad.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:34:48 GMT 9.5
More lovely quotes:
"We derived an estimate of between country heterogeneity in association by using the method of DerSimonian and Laird for random effects"
Translation: since our study is bogus, the results didn't make sense and weren't comparable between countries, so we made it believable by using someone else's arbitrary botch method to make it look credible and pretend the countries are all comparable. No one will notice because no one will bother to check out a boring reference anyway.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:37:55 GMT 9.5
More quotes:
"We report likelihood based 90% confidence intervals for estimates of the excess relative rate per Gy, a common approach in radiation epidemiological studies in which the objective is to evaluate whether an increased risk of cancer exists after exposure to radiation; this facilitates comparison of the precision of our estimated associations with findings reported in other important epidemiological studies of populations exposed to radiation."
Translation: other studies didn't look at dose rate, and they got paid, so we can't be bothered either.
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