Breathless Reporting about “Bad” Things (Like Fukushima Daiichi’s Escaped Radiation) Is Often Sensationalized due to Ignorance  — Illustrating the Information Problem Posed by Living among “Science Barbarians”

© 2011 Peter Free

 

29 November 2011

 

 

None of the criticism of aspects of the press reporting that follows is intended to diminish the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi radiation release

 

I have written about Fukushima’s bit of worrisome stupidity here, here, here, and here.

 

But I’m similarly concerned that affected people are being fed an unhealthy mix of unhelpfully restricted information (by Japan’s government) and over-sensationalized press accounts (by the general media, when it temporarily feigns an interest) — neither of which do anything useful to ameliorate a bad situation.

 

 

Without explanations that are accessible to the lay public, media reporting about escaped radiation is often unnecessarily scary

 

I illustrate this statement with a combination of examples taken from:

 

(i) the usually excellent blog Climate Progress,

 

(ii) Australian Broadcasting Corporation,

 

and

 

(iii) Japan’s  Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

 

These inadvertently sensationalized reports have to do with the (11 November) Japanese Science Ministry’s announcement that 8 percent of the country is now blanketed with radioactive cesium that began spewing from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster after the 11 March 2011 tsunami.

 

What is lacking in each article is a demonstrated understanding that journalists have the social responsibility to translate otherwise meaningless science “units” into medically useful information.

 

That said, these same reporters should be commended on continuing to follow the Fukushima disaster.

 

Consequently, I have mixed feelings in criticizing what I consider to be the scientific inadequacies of their reporting.  I do so because there is a larger point to be made.

 

 

Citations

 

Joe Romm, Radiation Covers 8% of Japan, Fukushima Crisis “Stunting Children’s Growth”, Climate Progress (28 November 2011)

 

Mark Willacy, Radiation covers 8pc of Japan, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (22 November 2011)

 

Ashai Japan Watch, Radioactive cesium spread as far as Gunma-Nagano border, Asahi Shimbun  (12 November 2011)

 

Mark Willacy, Fukushima crisis 'stunting children's growth',Australian Broadcasting Corporation (10 November 2011)

 

 

First, take Joe Romm’s sensationalized title as an indicator of his prioritization of attention-seeking over accuracy

 

“Radiation Covers 8% of Japan, Fukushima Crisis ‘Stunting Children’s Growth’”.

 

It is true that the Science Ministry reportedly said that radiation covered 8 percent of Japan.

 

But the blog title’s implications are not necessarily true.  The Ministry did not say that the radiation doses were harmful or that those radiation levels caused stunted growth in children.

 

Romm’s dramatic allusion to children’s growth comes from the following alleged and purely indirect relationship:

 

Shintaro Kikuchi is a paediatrician who has been tracking the weight of 250 kindergarten children in Koriyama, less than 60 kilometres from the crippled nuclear plant.

 

His findings are startling. They show there was an average weight gain of 0.8 of a kilogram over the past year.

 

The year before children in the same age group put on 3.1 kilograms, or nearly four times as much weight.

 

"We can blame this low-growth rate on the disruption to hormone production caused by stress" Dr Kikuchi said.

 

"Kids who can't get enough outdoor exercise tend to lose their appetite and they may then not get enough protein to build up their muscles."

 

Mark Willacy, Fukushima crisis 'stunting children's growth', Australian Broadcasting Corporation (10 November 2011)

 

A sample of 250 children is too small to make the causative inference that writers Willacy and Romm sucked readers into temporarily believing.

 

We don’t even know if Dr. Kikuchi did his “study” scientifically.  Allowing readers to infer that the radiation (or the fear of radiation) necessarily caused the damage to growth is socially irresponsible.

 

So what is a parent to do?  That’s where understanding radiation “units” comes in.

 

 

Look at what the Ministry allegedly actually said — and at the “units” they said it in

 

Asahi Shimbun reported that Japan’s Science Ministry had told the public:

 

The combined concentration of cesium-134 and cesium-137 exceeded 30,000 becquerels per square meter in certain areas of four municipalities in southern Iwate Prefecture--Oshu, Hiraizumi, Ichinoseki and Fujisawa--and parts of four municipalities in eastern Nagano Prefecture--Karuizawa, Miyota, Saku and Sakuho.

 

A concentration exceeding 60,000 becquerels per square meter was found near the border of Oshu and Ichinoseki cities and near the border of Saku city and Sakuho town.

 

Ashai Japan Watch, Radioactive cesium spread as far as Gunma-Nagano border, Asahi Shimbun  (12 November 2011)

 

So what is a becquerel?  Asahi Shimbun, Mark Willacy, and Joe Romm made no attempt to inform their readers of the unit’s definition or its relationship to health.

 

We can reasonably infer that not one of them knows.  The sensationalized inferences all three journalists make from the Ministry’s numbers is understandable, but arguably unjustified.

 

 

Radiation units vary according to the context being measured

 

When your goal is to sell papers and cause fright, accuracy doesn’t matter.

 

However, if one’s goal is to make a positive contribution to society — for example, in this case, giving frightened Japanese parents something meaningful to base their parenting precautions upon — accuracy does matter.

 

The four articles that I’ve cited capably illustrate the comparatively “barbaric” nature of a scientifically illiterate society and its press.

 

 

Becquerels are units that are not directly related (or relate-able) to public health

 

A becquerel is the SI (Système international d'unités) “metric” unit for radioactivity.  A becquerel refers to the radioactive decay of one nucleus per second.

 

This definition is not intuitive.  For example, the amount of material required to emit one becquerel changes with time.  Furthermore, radioactivity that is expressed in becquerels tells us nothing specific about the nature of the radiation, our exposure to it, or its impact on our health.  Other units have been invented to do that.

 

Consequently, the Science Ministry’s becquerel levels report said nothing that is easily or conveniently interpreted about the danger that the widespread radiation actually poses to people living in the affected areas.

 

 

A good explanation of the complexity of radiation “units” comes from MIT

 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a good explanation of radiation units, just after the Fukushima Daiichi release:

 

[There is a] difference between the raw physical units describing radiation emitted by a radioactive material (measured in units like curies and becquerels),

 

versus measurements designed to reflect the different amounts of radiation energy absorbed by a mass of material (measured in rad or gray),

 

and those that measure the relative biological damage in the human body (using rem and sieverts), which depends on the type of radiation.

 

“Just knowing how much energy is absorbed by your body is not enough” to make meaningful estimates of the effects, explains Jacquelyn Yanch . . . who specializes in the biological effects of radiation.

 

“That’s because energy that comes in very close together,” such as from alpha particles, is more difficult for the body to deal with than forms that come in relatively far apart, such as from gamma rays or x-rays, she says.

 

Because x-rays and gamma rays are less damaging to tissue than neutrons or alpha particles, a conversion factor is used to translate the rad or gray into other units such as rem (from Radiation Equivalent Man) or sieverts, which are used to express the biological impact.

 

© 2011 David L. Chandler, Explained: rad, rem, sieverts, becquerels: A guide to terminology about radiation exposure, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – News Office (28 March 2011) (sentences and paragraphs split for readability)

 

 

Radiation unit complexity does not lend itself to sensation-seeking, does it?

 

I imagine the Ministry’s reporting in becquerels was deliberate.  Since the numbers cannot be readily translated into the kind of radiation absorbed, and into what amounts over which duration, the Ministry may have assumed that nothing much would come of its reporting.

 

The becquerel numbers that the Ministry released sound high, when interpreted simply as absolute numbers like “60,000.”

 

If opaqueness was the Ministry’s goal — as we now have every right to assume, given Japan’s infuriating embargo on meaningful information after Fukushima — releasing its becquerel information may have backfired.  Joe Romm et al demonstrate this possibility with their arguably sensationalized reporting.

 

 

The moral? — the popular press is (sadly) not usually a good place to get meaningful scientific or medical interpretations

 

Accuracy and balance require knowledge, truth-seeking, and objectivity.

 

None of these qualities generally characterizes the global media, which seems intent on catering to our ignorance and fears, rather than to our willingness to learn and appropriately react.

 

I’m glad I am not a parent living in an irradiated area in Japan.