The Imaginary Threshold

Asahi Shimbun has been doing a respectable job on the Fukushima story, in the same sense that The New York Times does a respectable job on most major stories.  That is, both news companies publish very little that will engender disrespect from centers of government or corporate authority.  If the paradigms of objectivity and power change over time, they can always recast history, as The Times has done with its coverage of the war in Vietnam, which nowadays recalls the Pentagon Papers episode instead of its many years of pro-war reporting and editorializing and general disparagement of the peace movement.  (Anyone who worked at the paper during Abe Rosenthal’s decades of hardline terror knows just how politicized a newsroom can get.)  The Times will have a far more difficult task revising the narrative of its support for the war in Iraq.  But stories that involve science and technology are less amenable to this kind of rewrite, perhaps because the nature of factuality is less plastic.

Repeatedly, Asahi Shimbun has referred to the existence of a threshold for radiation exposure above which the risk of developing cancer increases.  Its reporters, most recently Yuri Oiwa and Toshio Tada, have even written that 100 millisieverts represents an “international consensus,” without citing any sources.

There is, of course, no such number, no such threshold, and no such consensus. Indeed, the international consensus, represented by the U.S. National Academies of Science BEIR VII report, is that cancer risk rises from zero as exposure rises from zero.  There is no cancer-free dose at any level. It may be impossible to draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship between exposure and development of cancer at very low doses, but this is due to statistical problems, not the existence of a biological threshold.

Why would Oiwa and Tada and other reporters make such a fundamental mistake? Maybe they have not read BEIR VII.  This would be the easiest deficiency to correct.  But maybe a Japanese establishment newspaper like Asahi Shimbun cannot yet swim against the current of government and corporate influence that is served by belief in safe doses of radiation.  This may take more time.
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Update 7/23: And now the Associated Press spreads the error.  So it goes.

Update 7/25: But some helpful guidance from Le Monde.

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