Barbara Hamrick, a radiation safety officer at the University of California’s Irvine Medical Center, was featured in an NEI video in which she asserted that radioactive fallout from Fukushima would pose no health threat to U.S. citizens and that the Environmental Protection Agency was equipped and ready to alert the public in the event that it did. According to Timothy J. Jorgensen, the director of the Health Physics and Radiation Protection Program in the Department of Radiation Medicine at Georgetown University, even Pacific tuna pose no threat. By the time the tuna migrate across the ocean, the levels of any radioactivity that they may have picked up in Fukushima coastal waters are well below natural background radioactivity levels. Gavin Gibbons, director of media relations for the National Fisheries Institute in McLean, Va., says, You may be able to find some activist-types who are willing to ignore the science and the regulatory perspective provided by agencies like FDA and NOAA and say there are concerns. But the fact is commercial seafood presents no genuine health concerns for consumers. Your average banana in the grocery store emits more radiation than fish tested off the West Coast. If cesium-134 levels in Pacific migratory tuna soar along with those in groundwater under Fukushima, Jorgensen still doesnt fear for consumers safety. He says that because there are no measurable health effects from the natural radioactivity in our food (foods such as bananas, nuts and fish), there can be no measurable health effects from the reactor radioactivity, which is hundreds to thousands of times less than the natural radioactivity in the fish. Is radiation exposure still a concern? I stood on a ship two miles from the Fukushima reactors in June 2011 and as recently as May 2013, and it was safe to be there (I carry radiation detectors with me) and collect samples of all kinds (water, sediment, biota). Although radioactive isotopes in the samples and on the ship were measurable back in our lab, it was low enough to be safe to handle samples without any precautions. In fact, our biggest problem is filtering out natural radionuclides in our samples so we can measure the trace levels of cesium and other radionuclides that we know came from Fukushima. ( Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 18:42:46 +0000
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