At a time when the Japanese prime minister is describing his country’s nuclear crisis and the growing threat of radiation exposure as “very grave,” it must have been comforting for Fox News watchers to turn on the O’Reilly Factor last night (3/17/11) to see Ann Coulter telling them that radiation is actually good for you.
Yes, Coulter told O’Reilly viewers, the evidence was right there in the media, including in the newspaper she’d once hoped would be targeted with a terror attack:
I’m citing a stunning number of physicists and from the New York Times and the Times of London, there is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.
The New York Times science section, for example, a few years ago reported on a study from Canada where all these women who had had tuberculosis got an inordinate number of chest X-rays. Their breast cancer rate was lower than the general population.
There were apartments put up in Taiwan in 1993 that accidentally contained an inordinate amount of cobalt-60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years 10,000 occupants of these buildings, being hit with five times what the government says is the minimum amount you should be hit with, the number of cancer cases they had about 10,000 occupants was only five cases.
Now, for the general population in that same age group, a group of 10,000 Taiwanese should have gotten about 170 cases of cancer.
I’m sure you’ll be surprised to find that it takes minutes to debunk Coulter’s scientific declarations on radiation. That “pro-radiation” Times science piece (11/27/01), for instance, does cite research finding that low-dose radiation can have beneficial effects– only to note that it has been generally dismissed by scientists as flawed:
Now, some scientists even say low radiation doses may be beneficial. They theorize that these doses protect against cancer by activating cells’ natural defense mechanisms. As evidence, they cite studies, like one in Canada of tuberculosis patients who had multiple chest X-rays and one of nuclear workers in the United States. The tuberculosis patients, some analyses said, had fewer cases of breast cancer than would be expected and the nuclear workers had a lower mortality rate than would be expected.
Dr. Boice said these studies were flawed by statistical pitfalls, and when a committee of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement evaluated this and other studies on beneficial effects, it was not convinced. The group, headed by Dr. Upton of New Jersey, wrote that the data ”do not exclude” the hypothesis. But, it added, ”the prevailing evidence has generally been interpreted as insufficient to support this view.”
And that Taiwan study demonstrating that radioactive cobalt-60 built into an Taiwan apartment building protected the inhabitants from cancer? It contained a “major flaw” in that it failed to control for age–where a subsequent study that did control for age found an increased incidence of cancer associated to the apartment building. As a summary of the literature on Wikipedia puts it:
In popular treatments of radiation hormesis, a study of the inhabitants of apartment buildings in Taiwan has received prominent attention. The building materials had been accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 but the study found cancer mortality rates 96.4 percent lower than in the population as a whole. However, this study compared the relatively young irradiated population with the much older general population of Taiwan, which is a major flaw. A subsequent study by Hwang et al. (2006) found a significant exposure-dependent increase in cancer in the irradiated population, particularly leukemia in men and thyroid cancer in women, though this trend is only detected amongst those who were first exposed before the age of 30.
So as an increasingly critical situation in Japan demands more accurate and useful information about radiation, the Fox News Channel‘s biggest show featured the ignorance of Ann Coulter. Just another reason why studies have found Fox News watchers more misinformed on the issues of the day than consumers of other corporate media outlets.
Given the deliberate misleading of the Times piece cited below on Aristide’s return – and countless others in the corpress en masse – that FOX viewers are *more* misinformed seems almost outside of the realm of possibility.
And very much within the realm of downright frightening.
Great work FAIR. Classic fact-checking journalism.
Come read my breakdown of the falsehoods on another Fox News show, Your World with Neil Cavuto. I explain how tea party pundit Lisa Fitsch grossly distorts the history of Martin Luther King and the Memphis strike of 1968. It can be found at http://jasonbeets.blogspot.com/2011/03/not-perversion-of-history-martin-luther.html
If you love FAIR, you’ll love my media fact-checking and analysis.
Also, she distorted the facts in the shipyard study, and the conclusion. The study did find an increase in cancers other than Leukemia: for example “a significant five-fold excess of mesothelioma”. The study concluded that exposure to gamma rays most likely contributed to those much higher rates of mesothelioma. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17690532
why do they use radiation to treat cancer patients if indeed there is no proof that radiation helps prevent cancer…. how does this fact differ with the report …. this is just a FOX bashing blog…. pthhhhh….
So- Apparently here is the refuge of the former scientific pro tobacco lobby- by golly death is good for all ills!
Nice work, Steve. Here is another source that Ms. Coulter “missed”:
National Research Council report “Health Risks from Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation” published in 2005.
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11340
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I have not seen a formal response from the appropriate scientific community, such as radiation safety scientists. I think such a response would be valuable.
I meant that I have not seen a formal response to Coulter from the radiation safety scientists, which I think would be valuable.
I do wish to add a little historical perspective to this discussion, which should not be interpreted in any way as support for Coulter. You see, back in the 1950s there were studies of various populations such as Norwegian and Sasketchewan uranium miners and the number of cancer cases as a function of exposure to various levels of radiation. These miners were exposed to much higher levels of radiation than the general public. And the incidences of cancer were also higher. As the level of exposure decreased, the incidences of cancer also decreased. However, data was and is scarce at low levels of exposure. So with a lack of data you make the simplest assumption. You assume the relationship between incidences of cancer and level of exposure is linear. You draw a straight line through the data points that you do have and put the line through the origin. This means if there is zero exposure to radiation, you would then have zero incidences of radiation-induced cancer. This has lead to discussions over the past 50 years whether there is some radiation threshold below which no harmful effects are incurred. Some scientists have suggested that becasue life evolved in a radiation environment, there might even be some benefit to the natural background radiation that we are all exposed to. These naturally ocurring levels of radiation are far less than any study Coulter has referred to. But I sense that somehow these legitimate scientific questions somehow surface in the popular culture highly distorted, are politicized beyond recognition, and used to promote very unworthy cause. Think global warming. How heavily politicized has that been?
The question that should asked of Coulter is why did she misrepresent the facts on that show. As much as I despise the woman, she’s not an idiot like Palin, she must have some intelligence to have qualified as a lawyer. So she surely read both the reports to the end, including the excerpts published here. Why, then, lie? To what end? I can somewhat understand her motives when she’s attacking Democrats, it’s the whole point of her existence, but this isn’t particularly political. Unless there is a growing anti-nuclear lobby in the US that she wants to discredit, but I’ve seen little evidence of that.
The second point, which I want to address to Elecpencil, is that the GOP and the Democrats aren’t all that different. Someone looking in from the outside, like myself (I live in Finland), can’t see a whole lot of difference between Bush and ‘Bama. Guantanamo continues, the war in Afghanistan escalates, support for the apartheid regime of Israel continues, drone attacks in Pakistan increase, the dictatorships in the Middle East are not opposed. The illusion that one party is inherently evil and one party inherently good is one fed to the American populace by your ruling elite, and it serves them well as it ensures that no real change will happen. Your democracy is sadly broken.