The only way Dr Caldicott is likely to get her hands on a piece of radioactive English lamb is if she goes and steals it from an affected farm.
There is no evidence for this trusting attitude towards your (or our) govt.
First, there is no safe level at all for radiation. Every amount of radiation is harmful, as a competent doctor will tell you. Because there’s a lot of different radiation around - cosmic rays, background radiation, radiation from underground, even UV rays can affect cells - the body has some coping and repair mechanisms, so a few milli-sievert in a year don’t kill you outright.
What doctors really use is percentages of probability - the more you are exposed, the more likely it is to get cancer from radiation (until a certain level; above a certain high level, like Ground Zero when you get thousands of Sieverts in one swoop, you do keel over and die from bleeding inner organs and similar fun). But since there are lots of other factors in your enviroment that also add (or lower) to that risk, plus your genetic disposition, they can’t chart a table for you, only for the average person.
And the kindly govt. in Bavaria just added “Milli” to their measurements to make them less scary after Chernobyl; just like the Japanese govt., when the measurements were above the safety limits two days ago, raised the safety limits from 100 units to 250 units. No scientific evidence for that at all, they just didn’t want to tell the population “Radioactivity is over the limit again”. Because the govt. cares more about the people staying calm than keeping them healthy.
Forest creatures and mushrooms are much more dangerous than normal food because mushrooms contain the radioactive elements due to them being different from plants like carrots. And wildlife eats the stuff in the forest and thus concentrates the elements. Whereas normal plants on fields were harvested and then put in special deposits, removing most of the radioactive elements from the soil, this wasn’t done for forests.
That’s what’s also so dangerous for humans: eating radioactive stuff means that the radioactive elements will be built into your body and continues to radiate every second for the rest of your life, destroying all the cells nearby. Unlike every other poison in that regard.
(corrected spelling)
Wherever do you get this from?? First, the people from the Schwarzwaldwould be upset that you’re putting them into Austria and Bavaria, when they are firmly in Baden-Württemberg.
Second, I’ve never heard that deer would walk all the way to the Black Forest from Austria and Bavaria to get their radioactivty there, because that would be quite a long walk.
Thirdly, serious organisations (suspicious after the measurements by the govt. were so low*) bought their own Geiger counters to do objective measurements after Chernobyl, and made detailed, public, scientific, charts and papers. It’s easy to follow and obvious to anybody not brainwashed by the nuclear lobby, how the rise of measured radioactivity follows the rain-down after Chernobyl and the slow move up the food chain.
- In contradiction to every known meterological theory, for some reason, the radioactive cloud after Chernobyl stopped on the German side of the Rhine river and didn’t cross into France, because the French didn’t measure anything in the weeks afterwards. Almost as miracolous as the way the Christmas tsunami in Indonesia hit all coastal regions save that dictatorship of Generals.
In the same way that a level-1 sunburn is no worse than the deadly burns at Hiroshima maybe.
Yes, you are naive. First, there have to levels of what is not allowed; each substance needs to be seperatly established with safe levels.
And secondly, you need enough inspectors to actually do more than spot checks. That costs money from the state, which the state often is reluctant to spend. If the companies know that only every 100th animal is checked, they don’t worry about being caught. Or if the penalties for being caught are a slap on the wrist - paying 5 000 Euro is nothing in this business.
That’s a slogan, not a fact. Low levels of radiation are not harmful.
Nonsense. The FSA is extremely thorough in monitoring all radioactivity in food. They prepare an annual report (2009 report here- full 2010 report not yet out) and go into 250 pages of exhaustive detail with all the detailed techniques and evidence.
Specifically regarding sheep and Chernobyl they deliberately try to find the most contaminated sheep in the flock and on each farm. See here.
In a case like this it is worth the state spending money. allowing contaminated lamb into the food chain would be way more expensive than monitoring sheep on a diminishing number of farms.
George Monbiot has some comments about Helen Caldicott in the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
I notice that the article has 1323 comments on it.
That “slogan” comes from the majority of doctors and scientists.
The “low levels of radiation are not harmful” I only hear from the pro-nuclear crowd.
Thanks for the Monbiot links. Lots of good stuff there.
My impression after reading around on this a little is that this is an unresolved issue, with serious scientists on both sides. How would you define “the pro-nuclear crowd”? For a scientist to be part of the pro-nuclear crowd, would he or she have to have a personal stake in the promotion of nuclear power? Pre-existing strongly stated support for nuclear power? Or would coming forward with opinions or conclusions which are compatible with investment in nuclear power be enough?
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/interrogation-of-helen-caldicotts-responses/
A detailed response to Helen Caldicott’s statments