"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."
"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."
I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:
It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.
I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.
I was very surprised to see statistics like that so soon after it happened. Typically reliable statistics for data like infant mortality are not available until awhile (read: a year) after the event.
And, frankly, even then it seems very early to draw a conclusive connection to Fukushima. Correlation != causation.
This person thinks they provide a distorted picture. Probably a good pass using all west coast cities and a more complete time span would be the best indicator.
"The eight cities included in the report are San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, and Boise, and the time frame of the report included the ten weeks immediately following the disaster."
I tried to source this on Google. I can't find the article by Sherman and Mangano, but found this discussion:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/4550
It appears the authors cited by AJE were using CDC data. Someone posts the infant death numbers at the Berkeley link. The numbers are very small with a lot of deviation. And it's not clear that they're even being measured against total number of births.
I've heard a lot of praise for AJE's reporting and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that TEPCO and the Japanese government were continuing to understate the risk, but this article seems shoddy and sensationalistic.