World Health Organization has a conflict of interest with regards to reporting on radiation hazards
Just thought you might want to know that the WHO has to clear any report it issues regarding health effects of a nuclear accident with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) first. The IAEA is responsible for (among other things) promoting and encouraging increased use of nuclear power throughout the world, and in so doing it also indirectly works to benefit the sales and profits of the nuclear power industry. Imagine if before the WHO could release a report on the hazards of tobacco smoke, it had to clear it first and get a thumbs up from a lobby group formed to promote the use of tobacco and concerned with increasing the profits of tobacco farmers and cigarette manufactures.
Toxic link: the WHO and the IAEA
A 50-year-old agreement with the IAEA has effectively gagged the WHO from telling the truth about the health risks of radiation
By Oliver Tickell May 28, 2009
Fifty years ago, on 28 May 1959, the World Health Organisation's assembly voted into force an obscure but important agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency – the United Nations "Atoms for Peace" organisation, founded just two years before in 1957. The effect of this agreement has been to give the IAEA an effective veto on any actions by the WHO that relate in any way to nuclear power – and so prevent the WHO from playing its proper role in investigating and warning of the dangers of nuclear radiation on human health.
The WHO's objective is to promote "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health", while the IAEA's mission is to "accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world". Although best known for its work to restrict nuclear proliferation, the IAEA's main role has been to promote the interests of the nuclear power industry worldwide, and it has used the agreement to suppress the growing body of scientific information on the real health risks of nuclear radiation.
Under the agreement, whenever either organisation wants to do anything in which the other may have an interest, it "shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement". The two agencies must "keep each other fully informed concerning all projected activities and all programs of work which may be of interest to both parties". And in the realm of statistics – a key area in the epidemiology of nuclear risk – the two undertake "to consult with each other on the most efficient use of information, resources, and technical personnel in the field of statistics and in regard to all statistical projects dealing with matters of common interest".
snip
Since the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in April 2007, a daily "Hippocratic vigil" has taken place at the WHO's offices in Geneva, organised by Independent WHO to persuade the WHO to abandon its the WHO-IAEA Agreement. The protest has continued through the WHO's 62nd World Health Assembly, which ended yesterday, and will endure through the executive board meeting that begins today. The group has struggled to win support from WHO's member states. But the scientific case against the agreement is building up, most recently when the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) called for its abandonment at its conference earlier this month in Lesvos, Greece.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/28/who-nuclear-power-chernobyl
= new reply since forum marked as read
The WHO is a major fly in the ointment of antinukes, because they present evidence signed off by hundreds of world-renowned experts, who tell it like it is - radiation ain't nearly as harmful as the trembling faithful think it is. That makes them a target, like original hippie Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, ferchrissakes) and Patrick Moore (one of the original founders of GREENPEACE, ferchrissakes), who are now members of the Big Undetectable Scary Radiation Conspiracy Coverup League because they've recognized nuclear's value in preventing global warming.
Who has the nerve to call themselves the "IndependentWHO"? According to their website, it's a "collection of associations and individuals". Apprently no doctors, no professionals, no experts, just another busload of antinuke protestors.
Who is ECRR? They're one step up - they have university degrees - but what they have in expertise they lack in numbers. The ECRR (or at least all that are accounted for on their website) is two people: Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake and Christopher Busby.
Inge Schmitz Feuerhake is a legit physicist, retired, but she was known as "the most well-known and likely most relentless anti-nuclear activist of Elbsmarch" after she claimed that 10 cases of child leukemia within 10km of a nuke plant in Germany were the result of elevated tritium levels. She also has a whopper of a persecution complex - she believes in a worldwide conspiracy and coverup of radiation research that lasted for a over a century. "We contend that unscientific attitudes and a culture of denial took root in skiagraphers’ (photographers) X-ray clinics shortly after Roentgen’s discovery in 1895—a defensive stance that resulted in an official cover-up of radiation research after Hiroshima that lasted throughout the Cold War", she claims.
Christopher Busby is a chemist who is known (by his family, anyway) for the self-published thriller, "Wings of Death: Nuclear Pollution and Human Health" (I'm not joking). In it he expounds on a theory about radiological damage called SET which has been universally rejected in the scientific community. When a committee he was serving on, the Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters, rejected his theory by a vote of 10 to 2 (Busby and a non-scientist supporter dissented) Busby took his ball and went home, and now sells the book on his website for ingestion by the antinuke faithful. After Fukushima he became the Arnie Gundersen of the UK, giving titillating media interviews which included a farfetched conspiracy theory about the Japanese Government intentionally spreading radiation. But this despicable creature took it one step further - he tried to profit from the disaster by selling spurious "anti-radiation" pills (called "Formula 1"
to the Japanese.
Parliament has given them far more recognition than they deserve by remarking that "ECRR is not a formal scientific advisory committee to the European Commission or to the European Parliament".
These are the nutcases, the charlatans, who have the gall to challenge people who are busting their butt to get to the truth. They wouldn't be worth wasting time on if they didn't stray into a reputable paper occasionally and make some noise.
Last edited Fri Mar 15, 2013, 12:31 PM - Edit history (1)
As Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake demonstrates, having letters after your name isn't a cure for paranoia. This is unsubstantiated, unscientific opinion - Dr. Baverstock doesn't have a shred of hard evidence of undue influence by the IAEA beyond his own personal impressions. In his world he is the "rational" one, and the legions of former antinukes who are abandoning his increasingly isolated point of view are "irrational". People like Dr. Baverstock are often marginalized because they're unprofessional and carry too much personal opinion into their line of work, which is almost impossible to avoid in organizations the size of WHO. That does not stop them from claiming, in their inflated self-opinion, they've been hushed or are the victim of some grand conspiracy - when actually they were just not up to the task.
Case in point: in 2002 Dr. Baverstock and a small team of exclusively Ukrainian/Russian scientists was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme and UNICEF to report on Chernobyl. The paper they came back with, The human consequences of the Chernobyl accident: a strategy for recovery was long on opinion, short on facts, and served to stoke fears that many researchers felt were unwarranted. For this reason the WHO issued a comprehensive followup report, Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes (2006) which relied on the work of hundreds of internationally-known and respected scientists from all over the world. This is the definitive work on the subject to date, and one that unfortunately for antinukes gives all the wrong (i.e., the correct) answers about the scope of radiation and its effects from the accident. Dr. Baverstock and his group apparently felt slighted, and instead of acknowledging a better report (the professional thing to do) retreated to the safety of antinuke fringe conferences where they've become heroes.
Your need to cast ad hominems at me, insinuating I claimed I'm a true expert (I didn't), is the kind of irrational response I've come to expect from antinukes with their backs to the wall. Please - do yourself a favor so you don't look so ignorant - and read the WHO's report. It's 176 pages long and it takes some work, but what you will see there is model of scientific collaboration and impartiality written by world experts who haven't been marginalized. Then, if you want to bring up some disagreement with methodology or whatever, I'd be happy to discuss. But no more outliers, no more nutters.
At least Dr. Baverstock doesn't wear a beret. 