The Toof Fairy is Back
January 2nd, 2009
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The toof fairy has been making her rounds trying to get kids who live near nuclear plants to hand over some teeth to prove that they were exposed to fission byproducts in recent years. Now, however, it seems that the original study started back in the 1950’s and concerned nuclear weapon tests, or to be more acurate, the attempt to lump nuclear weapons and nuclear energy into the same issue.
I’d be very surprised if they found anything, given the tiny amounts of fallout we’re talking about. I’d be equally surprised if they didn’t claim to fing something, given that the scientifically dishonest Radiation and Public Health Project that is conducting the “study”.
Baby tooth study resumes, seeking links between fallout radiation and cancer
Questionnaires will soon be sent to thousands of men who donated their baby teeth half a century ago to scientists seeking to learn whether radioactive fallout in milk the donors drank as children affected their health later in life.
It’s the latest step in a study that began in the 1950s and 1960s at Washington University, but then stalled for decades.
Fifty years ago, concern about atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons spurred a group of local scientists and other area residents to begin the project, then called the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey.
An early apparent link between fallout and health problems was established by the study. But now, more than 40 years later, the study is resuming. Researchers now hope to find links between fallout and instances of cancer in children born in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Letters containing health questionnaires will go out in the new year to the donors of 6,340 baby teeth. Those teeth have been kept in storage since the original study.
Preliminary results of the new study are expected by the middle of 2009, a New York-based scientist says.
The scientist, Joseph Mangano, is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He said in a telephone interview that his research group has had possession of 85,000 donated baby teeth since 2001 but lacked the money until recently to begin a full study of the cancer risk posed by nuclear tests.
Hmmm… I really wonder who donated the money to restart the study.
I see a couple of issues here. First of all, what the hell does the study of nuclear tests in the 1950’s have to do with teeth taken since 2001? Nearly all the fallout has long decayed and any levels of Sr-90 will be so minute that just getting a good measurement will require some really precise equipment. The teeth which are old enough to have been directly exposed to atmospheric testing fallout might be useful, but they too would by now have lost the majority of any radioactivity they had to begin with. Sr-90 may remain in measurable amounts, but most other fission byproducts will not.
I am pretty confident they won’t find anything. Radioneucleotides like Sr-90 can be measured down to the level of parts per trillion and if they look hard enough they’ll likely find what they’re looking for, even if at the tiniest of concentrations. That being said, I have no doubt that they will claim to have found a connection. Even if there’s no evidnece they’ll pull the standard crap: Claim that the results are not conclusive but that “there is reason to believe that there is a link.”
The reason? Because this is Joseph Mangano, a certified assclown and the Radiation and Public Health Project, a major institution of assclownery. I’d therefore be willing to bet that the combination of fifty year old teeth, talk of nuclear tests in the 1950’s, nuclear energy and modern teeth is all just part of the hodge podge or obfuscation which will be used to try to scare people about nuclear energy.
(Oh the children! It’s the children!)
This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 pm
There is going to be a spat of these sorts of junk science projects in the next little while, and lots and lots of FUD as the usual suspects try to kill any hope of the nuclear renaissance gaining any real ground in the U.S. If you look at the last few days we have seen attacks developing on several fronts: the NRC position paper on mini-reactors, the uranium is running out nonsense reported in the previous article here, and now this resurrection of a study that was considered worthless when it was first done.
I’ll say it again: Take it to the streets, or lose.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 2:08 am
Collecting teeth from the 1950’s and onward could theoretically have some real scientific value in establishing the exposure to fallout from weapons tests in the population and how the fallout patterns change over time and thus the public exposure. It is possible to trace artificial isotopes to a low enough concentration to find them in the body of virtually anyone.
Sadly, no useful science will come from the teeth in the collection of these nit-wits. Based on all we know of radiation and years of experience we can be sure that there is no danger from fallout these days and that even in the 1950’s it was pretty limited to a few regions. This has nothing to do with nuclear energy.
When there is a ’study’ that they are working on and those involved keep issuing ‘preliminary’ reports saying something or making off the cuff comments about what the data is indicating, yet the final report with all the data seems to be vaporware, that’s someplace where anyone should smell a rat.
In all seriousness, though, this kind of psuedo-science is a problem. Anyone in the field will see right through it but it still can impact public policy. That’s the danger.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 2:37 am
From the look of their page the radiation and public policy organization is not really concerned with science based radiation policy or studying it. It looks more like they’re all about radiation being feared and anything that might involve it banned. It reminds me of Linus Pauling, AFTER he went crazy.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 2:45 am
Nordurific said:
Oh, it’s a complete fabrication. They dress it up to be a research organization that you’d think is there to examine and objectively research radiation and advice public policy. It’s not, of course. It’s extremist crap.
There’s the same goddamned thing with groups called the ‘EMF Health Study Institute’ or something, which actually have nothing to do with study and never report any science that shows EMF’s are harmless at normal levels. It’s a front for a paranoid extremist group. Same damn thing.
The sad thing is with a good website and a reputable sounding name, they manage to trick people into thinking the have the same credibility as a legitimate scientific organization.
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January 6th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I’ll bet fifty bucks the study is funded by the coal industry. Any takers?
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January 6th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
ciccio said:
Eh. Maybe. It might also be funded by natural gas.
Actually, there are a bunch of powerful lobbies and influences which have a stake in promoting otherwise bad energy policy. I’ve recently started to wonder what the railroads might have in terms of lobbying when it comes to energy. They might not seem like they’d have a huge stake in things, but I can give two issues: Coal and ethanol. Railroads haul HUGE amounts of coal and it makes up a significant percentage of their business. Also ethanol, because it can’t be shipped by pipeline because of the water retention issues, can be a boon to railroads.
There are are other interests too: Not only coal companies but also coal unions, natural gas brokers, pipeline operators and potentially wind and solar companies who hope to make money off of government subsidies that they do not want threatened by the public taking a more educated look at energy systems.
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January 11th, 2009 at 2:31 am
I’m an ex-IT developer support science geek myself. I have seen some bad science in my day. My worst downfall was dealing with fantasy business models with real proof of concept results. I got in hot water many times proving that things could be done and why some things are just impossible. Quality Assurance bites when it’s all gray perception of what marketing wants.
I believe that they already measured the fission by products including plutonium concentrations back in the 50’s. I vaguely recall an article published by the DOE health effects department about pico-curie amounts of plutonium found in the teeth of kids in New York and St. Louis. They processed the teeth on some of the survey respondents back then. I’ll dig up the URL in a bit. Here’s a 2001 reference:
http://media.www.kaleo.org/media/storage/paper872/news/2001/12/03/News/Tons-Of.Teeth.Discovered-2806305.shtml
They were able to track down the test series that produced the fallout from the Nevada tests at the time.
The followup study must be just pulling the outcome medical records of those exposed.
Just look at the Nagasaki and Hiroshima survivors, they had lots of fallout to play in. Was there a massive cluster of cancers spanning the entire fallout area afterward? That’s a better comparison.
Nuclear reactors do generate Sr-90, but if they were dropping Pu all over, there would be a bigger problem like a core melt down! Only Chernobyl and the Windscale ever did that problem on a massive scale.
Tritium in the water from nuke plants? That’s Likely. More Cs-137 and Sr-90 ? Not very likely, someone would have blown the whistle by now if a plant was leaking that bad.
Besides, there are a couple billion curies of Tritium still raining down from the tests pre 1963 anyway.
With a half life of 13-14 years, it’s still going to be around a while.
I think the group has it right, someone is funding this as a shill for the anti-nuke groups to promote some other energy source. Anyone following the money?
There was concerns back in 1963 by Kennedy from the original study done from 1948-1963 to quote from:
http://www.mothersalert.org/babyteethletters.html
“We think that our findings may eventually replicate the success of the first baby teeth study started by Dr. Barry Commoner in St. Louis in 1958, which found , after collecting 60,000 teeth ,that Sr90 levels rose one-hundred fold from 1948 to 1963. In that year President Kennedy asked Dr. Ernest Sternglass to testify to Congress on radiation-induced childhood cancer, to accelerate the ratification of the ban on above-ground nuclear bomb tests. Dr. Sternglass is the scientific director of our current baby teeth study. “
So they are not going from samples from the 50’s in 2009, but also using the original data from the 1948-1963 results?
Bah, it’s confusing, but there are original records in the archive system of the gov’mint somewhere to pick over. They can’t refute the fallout in the past. But it would be like comparing Apples to Oranges from plant emissions from nuclear test. They wouldn’t spread the same anyway.
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