"We’re going to be hearing about Fukushima contamination for decades to come in U.S. and Canada" -Physician Dr. Erica Frank, MD, Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia: I learned about this issue a year after the meltdown at Fukushima when a really distinguished scientist from an organization called Fairewinds, Arnie Gundersen, said at a scientific meeting, “I’m not going to be eating Pacific salmon after 2013.” That really knocked my socks off, and I’m sure it would to an awful lot of your listeners. So, I started learning about this, formed a coalition of medical and public health organizations that are concerned — we’ve even had the American Medical Association sign on to this — and sent a request last September to the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., to the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. And got a letter back from all 3 of those agencies saying, “Yup, agree that’s a concern, of course we’re going to monitor and step up our monitoring.” That was last September, and as best as I can tell, and I wrote a letter a month ago, a follow-up, and also yesterday as I learned of this interview, that there has been no monitoring, certainly no published monitoring that we’ve been able to find, from either FDA or from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency or Public Health Agency. […] It’s awfully important for people to remember, we’re going to be having these conversations just about Fukushima for decades as leaks continue to happen. And we’ll have them for centuries and millennia with other radioisotopes and other nuclear power plants unless we stop building them and using them.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 02:58:03 +0000