MANCUSO AND NAJARIAN

Clearly, it is time for new quackery to be offered to the insatiable appetite of the sensation mongers. Exit Mancuso; enter Najarian, a physician of many years experience (he graduated from Medical School in 1974 and has recently completed his internship and residency at a Boston hospital). Najarian participated in Nader's Critical Mass meeting last fall and was received by The Master Himself (see cut), proudly sharing the glories of Helen Caldicott, Benjamin Spock, Sydney Wolfe and other such illustrious members of the medical profession.

(Above) Nader being impressed by Najarian; (left) " Nuclear economics expert" Komanoff addressing his fellow experts at Nader'.s Critical Mass conference.

[A small digression: " Nuclear economics expert" Charles Komanoff is now being quoted all over the press, and we truthfully told inquirers last month that we had never heard of the man. Since then we have seen his photo as he addressed Nader's meeting (above), which makes us suspect that he may be the Helen Caldicott of economics. Call it bias, but somethig tells us that he is not quite in Milton Friedman's class.]

But back to Najarian.We have little doubt that his conclusions on cancer incidence among workers of nuclear submarine shipyards yards will soon be refuted by the A.M.A., the Health Physics Society, the A.N.S., and other qualified organizations who often speak up when their fields are besmirched by particularly blatant nonsense, but in the meantime we find some revealing admissions tucked away innocently toward the end of Najarian's sensationalist article "The controversy over health effects of radiation" in Technology Review, Nov. 1978:

"A death rate study with workers at nuclear shipyards using the nuclear workers as compared to nonnuclear workers at the same shipyard in similar occupations will take at least two or three years to complete. .

."In other words, there is no trustworthy control experiment; without it, statistical data are worthless.

The controversy over nuclear hazards, opines Najarian, is likely "to continue perhaps even in the face of overwhelming evidence that substantial hazards exist which are worse than the alternatives to nuclear energy generation. That overwhelming evidence is not available today."

You bet it isn't. The overwhelming evidence, which Najarian and his likes have simply embezzled from their readers (and here we assume they have read the evidence on the subject they belabor), is that the alternatives present an incomparably greater hazard. That evidence has long been available from numerous studies, and has recently again been confirmed by the American A.M.A. (as well as by studies sponsored by the British and Canadian governments, respectively and both published last year).

[For a very readable account of some new data on coal, see "New fears surround the shift to coal," Fortune, 1 1/20/78.]