Radiation Levels Surge Outside Two Nuclear Plants in Japan

A recent article on the Al Jazeera English web site cites a disturbing statistic: infant mortality in certain U.S. Northwest cities spiked by 35 percent in the weeks following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The author writes that "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 [sic] may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant.” The implication is clear: Radioactive fallout from the plant is spreading across the Pacific in sufficient quantities to imperil the lives of children (and presumably the rest of us as well).

The article doesn't link to the Sherman/Mangano essay, but a quick search reveals this piece that begins "U.S. babies are dying at an increased rate.” The authors churn through recently published data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to justify their claim that the mortality rate for infants in the Pacific Northwest has jumped since the crisis at Fukushima began on March 11. That data is publicly available, and a check reveals that the authors’ statistical claims are critically flawed—if not deliberate mistruths.

Let’s first consider the data that the authors left out of their analysis. It’s hard to understand why the authors stopped at these eight cities. More important, why did the authors choose to use only the four weeks preceding the Fukushima disaster? Here is where we begin to pick up a whiff of data fixing. Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering.

This is not to say that the radiation from Fukushima is not dangerous (it is), nor that we shouldn’t closely monitor its potential to spread (we should). But picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics.