Scene: Their TV series may have been canceled in the early 1980s, but Mr. Roark and Tattoo still entertain guests on that mysterious tropical paradise known as... Fantasy Island. At the island cove where the Catalina flying boat lands with guests hoping to see their fantasies made real, Roark and Tattoo wait patiently.
Tattoo: Baas...baas... dee plane... dee plane...Ooo eez on it baas? Ooo? Ooo? Whaat eez der faantasee?
Roark: Well, my curious one, today we have four very unique guests. Each fantasizes about becoming a famous scientist.
Tattoo: A fameuse scientiste?
Roark: Yes Tattoo, famous like Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Galileo, Isaac Newton...
Tattoo: Baas...how can dey become fameuse?
Roark: Theirs is a special fantasy. They want to redo an epidemiologic study of the 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility.
Tattoo: Three Mile Island? Whaat's dat baas?
Roark: You see Tattoo, March 28, 1979 was a fateful day for the American nuclear power industry. A pressure relief valve became stuck open at the Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit-2 reactor releasing radiation into the surrounding area. Although ONLY SOME of the two million residents of the surrounding area MAY have received EXCEEDINGLY small amounts of radiation from the release, the anti-nuclear fearmongers seized the moment. They successfully blew the incident way out of proportion — to the point where nuclear power (a safe, clean and inexpensive form of energy) has begun to disappear from the United States.
Although a number of people sued claiming they developed cancer as a result of exposure to the radiation released during the incident, a federal court dismissed these claims because the plaintiffs failed to present any evidence that they were exposed to enough radiation to cause their cancers.
A significant reason for this court ruling was a 1990 epidemiologic study conducted by the Columbia University School of Public Health that reviewed the approximately 5,500 cancers that occurred during 1975 to 1985 among residents surrounding the TMI facility. [Am J of Epidemiol 1990;132:397-412] These researchers concluded that "overall, the pattern of results doe snot provide convincing evidence that radiation releases from the Three Mile island nuclear facility influenced cancer risk during the limited period of follow-up."
Tattoo: So what do our four guests 'ope to do?
Roark: Tattoo, these four individuals will re-analyze the same data used in the earlier study, then arrive at the opposite conclusion. If they can defend their conclusion scientifically, they will undoubtedly become famous scientists. Scientifically linking low levels of radiation to cancer risk would be a science milestone.
[The guests assemble. Roark raises his glass to toast his guests.]
Roark: My dear guests, welcome to Fantasy Island!
[Sometime later]
Tattoo: Baas...baas... our guests finished deir work. Here's deir new study. Will dey become fameuse?
Roark: Let's see Tattoo. They have concluded that the TMI incident is associated with an increase in cancer among the surrounding population. BUT:
1. Most of the claimed associations are weak (i.e., less than a 100 percent increase in risk). And as the National Cancer Institute has stated
In epidemiologic research, relative risks of less than 2.0 are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident. [National Cancer Institute, Press Release, October 26, 1994.]
Our guests did not adjust their claimed associations for the myriad of potential confounding risk factors for cancer such as smoking, diet, occupation, etc. They only considered age, sex, and some population socio-economic variables like median income, percent high school graduates, and population density. Hardly an adequate analysis for such vulnerable associations.
2. Also, they have not demonstrated how such low exposures to radiation could cause the reported effects. That is, the average person in the U.S. receives about 0.36 rems of radiation annually from natural background sources alone. Add in other exposures from medical diagnosis/treatment, consumer products and other manmade sources and the average person's exposure is probably much higher.
Radiation exposures from TMI were very low. The maximum exposure estimated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was only 0.0075 rems. And although radiation can increase cancer risk slightly, this has only been demonstrated at levels on the order of 20 rems (e.g., in the atomic bomb survivors) — more than 2,600 times higher than the TMI maximum estimated exposure.
3. Finally, our guests never determined (with anything approaching reasonable certainty) how much radiation individuals were actually exposed to. This is especially disturbing since the first sentence in the abstract of a previous Wing-led study titled Recording of External Radiation Exposures at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Implications for Epidemiological Studies stated:
Accurate measurements of radiation exposure for individuals are critical to assessing radiation-mortality associations. [J Expo Anal Environ Epidemiol 1994;4(1):83-93]
I'm sorry Tattoo. But this is simply not science. In fact, Tattoo, instead of becoming famous scientists, they are about to become famous junk scientists. I'm recommending them for induction into the Junk Science Hall of Shame.
Tattoo: Baas, dat eez too baad. I guess dey got confused about deir fantasee. Eet was about becoming famous. Not about cancer from dee Three Mile Island incident.
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