HORMESIS II!

The big news of the month is not British fusion at all; it is the publication of Prof. T.D. Luckey's second book on hormesis, Radiation Hormesis, published by CRC Press (2000 Corporate Blvd N.W., Boca Raton, FL 33431, hrdbd., 306 pp.), which has just come out 11 years after his first trail-blazing book Hormesis with Ionizing Radiation [AtE Oct 81].

Let me start out with the one and only serious flaw of this book:

It costs $160. The previous volume has meanwhile gone up to $110. Neither contains particularly difficult or expensive type (such as complex mathematics); this is simply an outstanding case of a cor-porate bureaucracy fleecing money from the socialist sector of the economy, in this case from a clientele of college and other tax-subsidized libraries who will buy anything at any price because CRC Press is on the wholesaler plan they subscribe to. They do not spend their own money, and the publishers care only about the big sales to the libraries, not about what the little man might need (I phoned their PR department many times to be sure to send me a review copy when the book was out, and they promised high and low they would, but what do they care about selling any extra copies? They didn't send as much as a raspberry, I got my copy from Prof. Luckey.)

So you will have to get your copy from a library (if they don't have it, make them buy it!), or if you are well-heeled enough, do not regret spending $270 for the two books, I cannot think of any-thing better that you can get for $270.

The new volume does indeed bring many updates, especially from the literature that has been published since then, but it is mainly devoted to the higher mammals, especially man.

I will not attempt the hopeless task of summarizing 300 pages jammed full of proofs, experiments, data and graphs. I will not even attempt to summarize the chapter called "Radiation Hor-mesis in Cancer." I will just limit myself to two pictures.

The first shows the essence of hormesis. At a normal radioactive dose (close to zero) there is a normal cancer incidence. If the dose is increased, it was long assumed, in the total absence of data, that the cancer incidence would increase also, and increase linearly. Nowadays this assumption is shared by few outside the antinuclear asylums. What Luckey has shown time and again under the most varied circumstances with data taken from all over the world is that when the dose is increased, the cancer incidence decreases until it reaches a minimum. Then it increases again, until it reaches the ZEP (Zero Equivalent Point) where things are as good as they were for no dose at all. Further increase in the dose will then, of course, be harmful and end up being lethal.

1 cGy = 1 centigray = 1 rad. Also note that the doses shown are chronic, not acute, i.e., received steadily over a long time. This is just as different as being hit by hundreds of gallons of water all at once (acute) as compared with a few gallons in the shower every day (chronic). As you might expect (and as this example shows), the human body tolerates chronic doses at much higher (accumu-lated) values than acute ones.

Among the most precious data are those collected by Prof. B.L. Cohen of the U. of Pittsburgh, who has investigated many hundreds of US counties for a correlation between exposure to radon and incidence of lung cancer. He found a correlation, but it is negative: radon is good for you, the more radon the less lung cancer. With his usual thoroughness, Cohen took precautions that his results would be statistically significant (for example, he ex-cluded counties with less than 50,000 females) and uncon-taminated by other effects such as smoking. He also noted low cancer mortality in cities where radon concentrations were high (New York, San Francisco), and pulling out counties with par-ticularly high and particularly low cancer mortalities, he obtained a result (see figure) which was not completely unambiguous, yet the least-square average curve shows a sharp decline with increasing radon concentration. ( This figure is adapted from B.L. Cohen, Health Physics, vol. 57, p. 897,1989).

1 mBq/l = 1 millibecquerel per liter = 2.7 x 10^-14 Ci/l (curies per liter). The low cancer rates are thus near 74 mBq/I = 2 x 10^-12 Ci/l = 74 pCi/l (picocurie/liter). You won't believe this, but the EPA radon-panic department demands remedial measures when the radon concentration hits 4 pCi/l, a value no less than 18.5 times as small. I would doubt that they do this out of premeditated malice in order to give people lung cancer; as good Greens they just ignore the facts and lay on the ritual humbug.

Since Roman soldiers first bathed in Bath, England, in 54 B.C. a whole series of other European spas have been discovered where the sick flock to rid themselves of their afflictions: Lourdes, Bad Gastein, Piestany, and many more. What they all have in common is a radon concentration ranging from 100 to 5,000 Bq/l = 2,700 to 135,000 pCi/l. True, this is in the water, not in the air, which may be "contaminated" to a far lesser extent, but even so it is a redoubt-able 33,750 times more than what drives the EPAcrats out of their alleged minds. And there is something else: these sick people "take the waters" only once or a few times in their lives: but what of the attendants who spend a lifetime next to the radon-"infested" water, breathing its fumes while they rub the patients dry? Herr Dr. Sternglass, vhy do zey not drop deadt like fliess by ze sousands? Vhat? Hat die Katze Ihre tongk gegottet?

By hook or by crook, get this work; there is no better book with which to exorcise the radiation snake-oil merchants.