Is Fukushima radiation killing U.S. babies? Not likely

The wide-ranging impacts of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan have been well reported.

But according to Dahr Jamail, a self-described "independent journalist" who previously spent time as a wilderness guide and rescue ranger in Alaska, there is a disturbing trend that has been conspicuously absent from headlines. In a story for Al Jazeera English -- an offshoot of the Arabic-language news agency Al Jazeera, based in Qatar -- Jamail reports that there has been a 35 percent increase in infant mortality rates in the U.S. Pacific Northwest since the Fukushima disaster. Jamail cites a report compiled by progressive activists Janette D. Sherman and Joseph Mangano, who pull data from recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports as an attempt to back the claim that U.S. children are dying en masse since the Fukushima disaster.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but that's all the substance the researchers are able to provide, because there appears to be more at play than a pair of concerned doctors turning to Jamail to shine light on a story that's been inexplicably underreported.

 

A Scientific American analysis concluded that the Sherman and Mangano report uses data fixing. As proof that the numbers are twisted, the article cites two particular pieces of evidence:

-- Sherman and Mangano self-selected eight cities that do not provide a statistically viable indicator of infant mortality in the Pacific Northwest, as Jamail indicates in his story. They could have included any number of other cities that would have driven down the infant mortality rate to a more accurate level, but they conveniently excluded data that would have lowered it.

-- Sherman and Mangano compared the four weeks before the Fukushima disaster to the ten weeks after as "conclusive" proof that there was an increase in infant mortality. Had the 10 weeks prior -- rather than just the four -- been included in their study, it would have been obvious that infant mortality had not swayed heavily in either direction as a result of the disaster.

There is legitimate cause for Alaskans and others in the Pacific Northwest to keep a watchful eye on the debris and possibly hazardous waste floating this way, but as Scientific American puts it, "picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics.”