The World Health Organization in Thrall to the Nuclearists
Thursday, 29 May 2014 00:00By Robert James Parsons, Truthout | Report
A radioactive sign hangs on barbed wire outside a café in Pripyat, Ukraine. (Image: EL / TO ; Adapted:D. Markosian / DoD; WHO / DoD)
The International Atomic Energy Agency, whose mandate is the promotion of everything nuclear, has - for the last 55 years - prevented the WHO from carrying out its public health mandate in a world ever more exposed to the lethal effects of ionizing radiation.
For 55 years, as of May 29, 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been under the heel of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in matters regarding ionizing radiation and health. The IAEA, whose mandate is the promotion of everything nuclear, has thus prevented the WHO from carrying out its public health mandate in a world more and more exposed to the lethal effects of ionizing radiation.
At 8 AM on Friday, April 25, one day before the 28th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, two anti-nuclear activists met at the entry of the drive leading to the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva for a day's vigil. They were there to protest the 1959 agreement that binds the WHO to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), giving the latter veto power over anything that the WHO may propose to do regarding human health and ionizing radiation. They stayed there until 6 PM.
As the work day at the WHO runs from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM, the vigil-keepers were seen by virtually all WHO employees and visitors, as well as by those traveling the public thoroughfare going by the entry (including students from the Geneva International School, just up the street). But this was nothing new, for on that day, the vigil was finishing its 365th consecutive week.
Begun on April 26, 2007, the 21st anniversary of Chernobyl, by a group of dedicated and extraordinarily well informed anti-nuclear activists, the Hippocratic Vigil, as it calls itself, goes to the heart of the matter: if the general public is uninformed about the intolerable dangers of ionizing radiation from nuclear power and nuclear weapons (as well as about the indissociable link between the two), that is because over the past 55 years there has been far too little work on the dangers to human health from ionizing radiation. None of that work has been done by - much less supported by - the WHO.
The "permissible dose" was thus determined to be that to which all members of the United States population could be exposed without producing more cancers than could be cared for by the medical establishment.
On May 29, 1959, the World Health Assembly, the WHO's general assembly of all its member states and the world's highest instance for setting public health policy, approved in a binding resolution anAgreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization. Its Article 3 states: "Whenever either organization proposes to initiate a program or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual consent."
The WHO steadfastly maintains this has never had even the slightest influence on the independence of its work. According to Independent WHO, the group keeping the daily vigil, the effect of the agreement has been disastrous, effectively muting the world's foremost voice in public health on a matter that is of crucial importance. Everything on the record bears out this latter contention.
In effect, this right of prior approval has been granted to an institution that, while generally perceived as neutral, has as its mandate the promotion of the entire nuclear sector. The IAEA's founding charter states: "The agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity through the world." Yet nuclear reactors were initially conceived as production plants to supply plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The nuclear-free zones on earth, brokered by the United Nations through the IAEA, are really nuclear-weapons-free zones, with the treaties establishing these zones routinely agreeing the "peaceful use of nuclear energy in the zone" shall be promoted, i.e. the reactors that will provide the plutonium necessary for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Dr. Helen Caldicott has recalled:
In the early days of nuclear power, WHO issued forthright statements on radiation risks such as its 1956 warning: "Genetic heritage is the most precious property for human beings. It determines the lives of our progeny, health and harmonious development of future generations. As experts, we affirm that the health of future generations is threatened by increasing development of the atomic industry and sources of radiation . . . We also believe that new mutations that occur in humans are harmful to them and their offspring."
Independent WHO cites the last study done by the WHO on ionizing radiation and human health. The study's report, "Effect of Radiation on Human Heredity: Report of a Study Group convened by WHO together with Papers presented by Various Members of the Group," is dated 1957. The director of the study group was Hermann Joseph Muller, who had won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine "for the discovery of the production of mutations by means of X-ray irradiation."
Among the members of the study group were Rolf Maximilian Siev, after whom one of the most common measures of ionizing radiation was named, and T.C. Carter, later to be named to the Order of the British Empire for his work on the subject.
Already in 1958, Carter was exploring the devastating effects of low-dose, long-term radiation to sperm mutation. In an article published in Nature on August 9, 1958 by himself and two other researchers, one reads: "Most genetically effective radiation exposure of man is due to low doses accumulated over an appreciable fraction of the life-span."
The authors went on to declare that this meant that the second of the four fundamental assumptions regarding the danger to human genetic material from ionizing radiation - that the relationship of mutagenic effect to dose rate is linear - was untenable. This was highly significant because this assumption still undergirds official radiation safety norms, even though it has been denounced repeatedly by all independent researchers.
According to the linear principle, maintained by phalanxes of pseudo-scientists from the nuclear lobby, the effects of low-level radiation are too small to be measured. Extrapolating from the observed effects of high dose, single-event irradiation (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it was concluded on this basis that, for example, if 1,000 survivors became ill after exposure to a dose of 100 (an arbitrary figure for demonstration), 500 would be ill when exposed to 50 and only one from a dose of 0.5. Thus, below this exposure level - called the "permissible dose" - nobody is affected.
The Cynicism of the "Permissible Dose"
Dr. Rosalie Bertell, an epidemiologist who specializes in the effects of ionizing radiation (who, until her death in 2012, spent almost two decades studying Gulf War Syndrome/Illness and attributed it to low-level radiation poisoning from depleted uranium weapons) kept insisting on the pure cynicism of the principle of the "permissible dose" - commonly and erroneously called a "safe dose."
According to Dr. Bertell, the idea was developed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950s in response to major objections emanating from the scientific community regarding the safety of those engaged in research for more and greater nuclear weapons. The "permissible dose," Dr. Bertell pointed out, was established on the basis of the capacity of the United States hospital system - then in full expansion with bright days ahead of it - to take care of cancer cases caused by ionizing radiation. The "permissible dose" was thus determined to be that to which all members of the United States population could be exposed without producing more cancers than could be cared for by the medical establishment.
Dr. John W. Gofman, who led the team that isolated the first milligram of plutonium in 1942, in his monograph "Radiation Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure," stated - and then throughout the rest of his life continued to insist - succinctly, that "by any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose."(1)
In 1958, the WHO published a 53-page technical report, which turned out to be the last installment of the work of Muller's study group after the 1959 agreement put an end to it. "Mental Health Aspects of the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy" explored the anxiety among the ever greater number of people exposed to ionizing radiation subsequent to the1953 Eisenhower administration's launching of the Atoms for Peace program, intended to sell the public on the idea of hundreds of nuclear reactors generating "electricity too cheap to meter."
The final paragraph is both ominous and prescient: "But in the long run, the greatest hope of mental health in the future of the peaceful uses of atomic energy is the raising of a new generation which has learnt to live on terms with ignorance and uncertainty and which, in the words of Joseph Addison, the 18th century English poet, 'Rides in the Whirl-wind, and directs the Storm.'" (p.45)
Bogus Science
Paul Zimmerman, in his brilliant 758-page tome A Primer in the Art of Deception: The Cult of the Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science,(2) easily the best and most comprehensive work on the subject in any language, explores the fraudulent science, in detail, in discussing the depleted uranium particles produced by the burning of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds used in the 1991 Gulf War.
Uranium burns at up to 6,000 degrees Celsius. The resultant particles are ceramic-like, microscopic and virtually indestructible. Further, they are mostly disk-shaped and extremely thin. This huge amount of surface relative to the mass of the disks makes them easily air-borne, like dead leaves, in spite of the density of the metal. The reactor fire at Chernobyl and explosions at Fukushima transformed tons of uranium fuel in the reactors into the same sort of air-borne particles as those resulting from the use of uranium weapons.
Drawing on the work of the late Dr. Leonard Dietz, one of the foremost independent researchers in the field of ionizing radiation, Zimmerman explains that a single, invisible uranium particle whose diameter is 2.5 microns, or one ten-thousandth of an inch, is respirable. A depleted uranium particle of this dimension is estimated to consist of 210 billion atoms of the uranium isotope U238.
It is at the level of the cell where radiation effects become significant, not over large masses of tissue.
While lodged in the lung, the uranium particle undergoes radioactive decay, emitting alpha particles, the most powerful force in the universe. If one imagines the uranium particle as being at the center of a sphere of cells whose radius equals the maximum distance that the alpha particles are capable of traveling, the potential sphere of cells constantly irradiated will be 0.0000001519 centimeters. Dr. Bertell put the number of cells in this sphere at between 200 and 300. Zimmerman explains: "Taking into account the relative biological effectiveness of alpha particles, the dose to the vulnerable population of cells is 170 rem per year."
He then quotes Dr. Dietz regarding the currently accepted "safety" model, which "cannot deal with small volumes and inhomogeneities of dose, and for this reason is unsafe to apply to internal radiation."
According to current norms, a member of the public is permitted in any one year to receive a dose of no more than 0.5 rem - to the whole body. In other words, as Zimmerman explains, "It is thought that the organism can absorb the energy of 0.5 rem and undergo the amount of ionization produced by this energy throughout its molecular structure without causing any significant health detriment. And yet, the single particle of depleted uranium transfers in one year 170 rem to the tiny cluster of cells in its immediate vicinity . . . . It is at the level of the cell where radiation effects become significant, not over large masses of tissue. Any honest approach to radiation safety would be grounded on this fundamental fact."(3)
Further, besides the alpha particles released by uranium atoms, there are the beta and gamma radiation from the resulting daughter isotopes. One of these daughter isotopes is the gas radon. Thus, wherever there is uranium (as in the core of nuclear reactors and in nuclear weapons), radon will inevitably be constantly emitted in a specified quantity through the transition from one isotope to another down through the decay chain.
The absence of proof of danger from the WHO is regularly cited as proof of absence of danger.
The bunker busters used by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere typically contain a ton of uranium, which burns just like the uranium in the anti-tank rounds, producing billions of trillions of microscopic particles each. Also, images of hits with Hellfire and Tomahawk missiles show explosions that resemble exactly the explosions from bunker busters, with similar subsequent destruction, although these missiles are not necessarily carrying one-ton warheads. These particles then travel in the air throughout the planet and are incorporated into the food chain and inhaled and lodged in people's lungs. The time required for the decay chain to exhaust itself so that the material becomes a stable element in the form of lead is 20 billion years, making the contamination permanent. (The solar system is reckoned to be 4.5 billion years old.)
Samples taken from craters in South Lebanon after Israel's assault in August 2006 and analyzed by the United Nations Environment Program in the Swiss military laboratory in Spiez revealed low enriched uranium from those bunker busters. Particles that do not become airborne can enter the local water tables and the food chain - just like those from Chernobyl and Fukushima - and ultimately the human body.
None of this is taken into account in the international "safety" standards that the WHO champions. In the absence of constant, thorough, in-depth research on ionizing radiation and health, independent advances in understanding these phenomena, while impressive, have remained relegated to the periphery as the absence of proof of danger from the WHO is regularly cited as proof of absence of danger.
The WHO Chernobyl Conference That Fell Down the Memory Hole
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