BY HARRIET HALL, M.D.
FOR MOST PEOPLE, RADIATION IS VERY scary. You can’t see it; you may not know if you’ve been exposed. We’ve all read the horror stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When radiation leaked from the Fukushima reactor in 2011, people all the way across the Pacific Ocean feared for their health. Alarmist headlines blared “Fukushima radiation has reached U.S. shores!” Cesium-134 had been measured in seawater samples from beaches in Oregon, and in Canadian salmon. A senior scientist quelled fears by putting this news into context: “if you were to swim every day for six hours a day in those waters for a year, that additional radiation from the addressed cesium from Japan…is 1000 times smaller than one dental x-ray.”1
Most people think radiation is not natural. Actually, yes it is. We are exposed to radiation from cosmic rays. We get more background radiation if we live in the mountains or fly frequently, and if we live in stone or brick houses or in homes with radon in the basement. There is radioactive potassium in bananas, potatoes, beer, and many other foods. Tobacco leaves contain radioactive polonium 210, with a half-life of 138 days. It falls onto the tobacco leaves from the atmosphere and is a major cause of lung cancer. We are even exposed to radiation from our own bodies. There is no way to avoid it. We know that ionizing radiation damages and mutates DNA and can cause cancer.
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About Skeptic
BEHE’S LAST STAND
COLUMNS
The SkepDoc: Is Low-Dose Radiation Good for You? The Questionable Claims for Hormesis, by Harriet Hall, M.D. • The Gadfly: Define Your Terms (or, Here we Go Again), by Carol Tavris
ARTICLES
Making Gasoline from Water: John Andrews and the Invention of a Legend • Online Gaming: A Virtual Experiment in the Dark Side of Human Nature • Duped by Data Mining • How Science Will Explain and Fix Fake News • The Cult of Falun Gong: A Dance Troupe and Victimhood Raises Big Money • The Opioid Epidemic Misunderstood • Why the Human-Centered View Has Not Served us Well • Behe’s Last Stand: The Lion of Intelligent Design Roars Again • Straw Man on a Slippery Slope: The Case Against the Case Against Postmodernism • A Disproof of God’s Existence
REVIEWS
Reviews of: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure; The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake; Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits; Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post- Facts, and Fake News; Hoax: A History of Deception: 5000 Years of Fakes, Forgeries, and Fallacies; Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War Over Anthropology
JUNIOR SKEPTIC
Quest for the Truth about Dungeons and Dragons