I know the whole “humans are not mice” thing … but wouldn’t tests on lab animals go a long way toward refining exposure models?
Yes, you can’t just assume that things will affect humans the same way they affect mice. And maybe a mouse model of long-term exposure is hampered by the short lifespans of mice. But surely that data, used in combination with the human data we already have, could help produce a more accurate, reasonable model?
In part, yes, that’s where many of our chemical and exposure limits come from.
But got it right in one. You can’t expose a mouse to decades of low level radiation, because mice rarely live to be 3. And you can’t just use 10 times the radiation because that’s exactly what you want to research.
What we have is pretty much how we know LNT is wrong, because we don’t really see more health risks in people who live in naturally more radioactive areas. But you can’t really construct a proper model from that kind of data. If you want to use a model for tens of millions of people over decades, even the tiniest change can make it go from “no harm at all” to “tens of thousands of corpses”.
I know the whole “humans are not mice” thing … but wouldn’t tests on lab animals go a long way toward refining exposure models?
Yes, you can’t just assume that things will affect humans the same way they affect mice. And maybe a mouse model of long-term exposure is hampered by the short lifespans of mice. But surely that data, used in combination with the human data we already have, could help produce a more accurate, reasonable model?
In part, yes, that’s where many of our chemical and exposure limits come from.
But got it right in one. You can’t expose a mouse to decades of low level radiation, because mice rarely live to be 3. And you can’t just use 10 times the radiation because that’s exactly what you want to research.
What we have is pretty much how we know LNT is wrong, because we don’t really see more health risks in people who live in naturally more radioactive areas. But you can’t really construct a proper model from that kind of data. If you want to use a model for tens of millions of people over decades, even the tiniest change can make it go from “no harm at all” to “tens of thousands of corpses”.
https://www.cleanfutures.org/dogs-of-chernobyl/
cough cough