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