Dr Rosalie Bertell
Radiation
Assassinations
Dr Rosalie Bertell. An American Catholic nun and researcher for the National Cancer Institute, in 1977 she discovered that low radiation levels caused leukaemia and other health problems, with serious implications for the nuclear industry. When she spoke out about this, she experienced severe harassment (pdf), including attempted murder. Her papers (pdf) detailing her experiences are now in the National Archives of Canada.
Nuclear Witnesses, Chapter 2, Rosalie Bertell, Mathematician and Medical Researcher, by Leslie J. Freeman, 1981. I had been measuring the health effects of one, two, three, four, and five chest X-rays. Then I found that the federal government allows the general public to receive up to five hundred millirems per year. That is equivalent in bone marrow dose to one hundred chest X-rays per year. That really was shocking! Moreover, I learned that nuclear workers are allowed to receive up to five rems--which is the bone marrow equivalent of one thousand chest X-rays per year! These are the federal regulation protection standards! When you approach it from that direction, from low to high, instead of coming down to the standards from the atomic bomb casualties where people died immediately from high levels of radiation, the impact is different. Federal standards derive from research on high exposures in a bomb situation. Those who determined the standards reduced the exposure level to one where you didn't see anybody drop dead.It looked like a "safe" amount. But it isn't. Understanding this standard is crucial right now with respect to the Three Mile Island accident, because the NRC has declared it "not an extraordinary event." And their criterion for declaring something an "extraordinary event" is that somebody off-site, a member of the general public, received an exposure of twenty rems or more. That's the equivalent of four thousand chest X-rays!
