Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano and internist/toxicologist Janette Sherman have published a peer reviewed study on excess deaths - primarily of infants - in the U.S. in the first 14 weeks after the Fukushima Daiichi mass meltdowns, explosions and fires in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services.
The authors say the statistically significant increase in deaths is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths recorded in the U.S. in the 17 weeks following the Chernobyl accident in 1986. The article is scheduled to be published tomorrow by the journal, and will be available at Mangano's website at 11:00 AM.
The authors issued an early alert back in April about what they were finding after just a few weeks of beginning the study, which was dismissed by the usual suspects as mere statistical anomalies that had nothing to do with levels of iodine-131 (and cesium-134, cesium-137 and strontium-90) in contamination plumes from northeastern Japan. Yet the EPA, during its few weeks of monitoring of fallout as the plumes transversed North America, found high levels in air, water and milk in many places. For instance, iodine-131 was detected in precipitation falling on Boise, Idaho at nearly 200 times 'normal'.
Dr. Sherman, an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, was a contributing editor of Chernobyl - Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, published by the NY Academy of Sciences in 2009, and authored Chemical Exposure and Disease and Life's Delicate Balance - Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer. She said about this article...
"Based on our continuing research, the actual death count here may be as high as 18,000, with influenza and pneumonia, which were up five-fold in the period in question as a cause of death. Deaths are seen across all ages, but we continue to find that infants are hardest hit because their tissues are rapidly multiplying, they have undeveloped immune systems, and the doses of radioisotopes are proportionally greater than for adults."
Statistics from the CDC on weekly death reports for 122 U.S. cities (population >100,000) were analyzed for the study during the period of March 20 to June 25. The CDC's reports cover approximately 25-30% of the population, and in those weeks registered a 4.46% rise over the same period in 2010. For the 14 previous weeks CDC recorded a 2.34% increase over that same period in 2010.
We can of course predict that publication of this study will meet with the same objections the authors garnered back in April, but I thought a heads-up on its publication - and a link to where it will be made available tomorrow - was warranted. I know I'll be downloading a copy and will read it carefully. We may presume there must be a reason why deaths rose so precipitously when the fallout plumes reached North America, but I don't know if that rise can be reliably pinned on the fallout. It's certainly worth a look-see.