That is depressing. I wonder what we will find out 20 years from now what they knew and didn't do then.

Infant mortality rates have already gone up on the West Coast as a result of Fukushima, according to Joseph Mangano, an epidemilogist and Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project research group, and Janette D. Sherman, M.D., a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology who has studied and written about Chernobyl’s effects. They report that the rates of baby deaths in the Northwest, as measured in Portland, Seattle, Boise, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Jose and Berkeley, has risen 35% in the 2 1/2 months since the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe (and risen 2.3% nationwide in that time). This is consistent with what happened in Europe after Chernobyl:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

Sound far-fetched?

I went to a hearing in Salem on whether to build the (now defunct) Trojan Nuclear Plant. I sat in the front row, just a few feet away from the legislative panel hearing the testimony. Vincent Atiyeh, before he became Governor, was on the panel. I watched Atiyah fall asleep early on and sleep soundly during the rest of the testimony.

Among the testimony was that of a third-year medical student who had done some independent research on the radiation levels on fetal and infant mortality rates. He made one graph of fluctuating radiation levels measured around a nuclear plant (I don’t remember were now) and another of infant deaths and fetal deformities and deaths in the area, made transparencies of the curves, and flipped one over the other. They matched exactly.

That piece in Counterpunch is awfully trumped-up. If you look at the actual CDC numbers for Portland for the 12 weeks following the meltdowns, infant mortality was actually 33% lower than in the same period in 2010.

There's also a video of an earless bunny in the Fukushima area floating around. The suggestion is that it's a radiation-induced mutation. But earless bunnies are not all that uncommon.

Fukushima is a tragedy, but neither of those stories impresses me at all.

Where do you find those CDC figures for Portland? I'd appreciate a link.

Hmm. Looking at the death rate and injury counts, you know who I don't trust? Large "organic" farm operations.

last week’s E. coli outbreak in Germany - traced to an organic farm - was more deadly than the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter-century. Yet, the 35 deaths and more than 1,000 hospitalizations caused by an industrial accident at an organic farm in northern Germany have not resulted in the sort of international mobilization witnessed in the case of the BP leak nor the Fukushima disaster.

Max: Are the italicized words a quote? If so, from where?

First, I would not condemn organic farming on this basis, as you seem eager to do. I would definitely want to know more about that farm-- if indeed this was the origin-- and what a "large" organic farm operation means-- a factory-like farm?

Second, to say that this incident was more deadly than the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter century, larger than the BP Gulf Oil Spill, is so wrong that it brings to mind this quote, imperfectly paraphrased, "You cannot reason a man out of a position that was not arrived at by reason."

Start here and dig around: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/

It's the last table in the last item of each week's issue. Click here and scroll down for the latest one, released on Friday:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6022md.htm?s_cid=mm6022md_w

I tallied up the last 12 weeks of deaths under the age of 1 in Portland. The total was quite a bit lower than the same 12 weeks last year -- 18 compared to 24, IIRC.

Thanks, Jack. I'll check it out.

P.S. To correct the record-- I realized when I re-read my June 13th post that I had typed "Vincent Atiyeh." Of course, our sleeping governor's name was Victor Atiyeh...