In Defense of Irradiation
One thing that is really frustrating is to see Left-oriented public health advocates give information that is technically correct but leaves out extremely important information. I realize not everybody reads about science obsessively, but if you’re going to write about a scientific issue, it would behoove folks to become at least rudimentarily acquainted with the basic scientific principles.
The article annoying me today is David Corn’s piece on irradiation, Irradiated Food: Safe or Scandalous?. Corn describes a dinner with Samuel Epstein which he recounts, in part, like this:
He quickly gained our attention with a factoid: beef, which is irradiated (that is, shot with radiation to kill off bacteria and increase the product’s shelf-life), undergoes the equivalent of 150 million chest x-rays. The food and irradiation industries maintain this poses no threat to whoever ends up eating the treated meat. A reasonable reaction from a lay person is a skeptical “yeah, right.” Epstein was armed with more than skepticism.
This is a common, but silly, objection that appears repeatedly in both environmentalist and Left criticisms of irradiation. The problem is that comparing x-ray radiation to irradiation is absurd for a very important reason: x-rays are an ionizing form of radiation, whereas irradiation uses exclusively non-ionizing forms of radiation.
In fact a reasoanble person woudl be insane to eat food that had been bombarded with the equivalent of 150 million chest x-rays. The food would almost certainly be radioactive itself and pose considerable risk for anyone foolish enough to eat it.
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November 12th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
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