2024-02-15
There Has Not Been a Single Case Anywhere in the World of Someone Developing Leukemia from Exposure to Five Millisieverts per Year.
October 16, 2019
The essay spanning pages 64–71, in three-column format, in the special New Year’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL (820 yen) proved my intuition—which is also grounded in my own experience—100 percent correct.
At the same time, it brilliantly conveys what kind of newspaper the Asahi Shimbun is.
As I have said repeatedly, all young people aged 18 and over who will have the right to vote starting next year must subscribe to these monthly magazines.
This is because, without reading these magazines, they cannot understand the truth about what is happening.
Bold emphasis other than the title, and the passage enclosed between asterisks, are mine.
The Asahi Shimbun Awaits “Deaths in Fukushima”
Nobuo Ikeda, Economist
Born in Kyoto Prefecture in 1953.
After graduating from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo, he joined NHK.
After leaving NHK in 1993, he became a professor at the International University of Japan’s GLOCOM.
After serving as a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, among other positions, he became director of Agora Research Institute, Inc.
His recent books include The Collapse of the Myth of Nuclear Power’s “Dangers” (PHP Shinsho), The Asahi Shimbun’s Great Misreporting of the Century (Aspect), and The End of Postwar Liberalism (PHP Shinsho), among many others.
The Asahi Shimbun Never Learns
There has been no radiation harm from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, and evacuees have begun returning home.
It is fortunate that an accident caused by one of the largest earthquakes in history did not become a catastrophe, but some people are not pleased with this outcome.
They are the media outlets that caused an uproar immediately after the accident, declaring that “tens of thousands will die” or that “30 million people must evacuate.”
In particular, the Asahi Shimbun, which launched a “zero nuclear power” campaign following the accident, repeatedly published absurd reports such as claims that “the nuclear accident caused nosebleeds,” and has recently continued piling lies upon lies with claims such as “thyroid cancer has increased fiftyfold” and “a worker developed leukemia.”
This is the same as the false campaign they once conducted over the comfort women issue.
What have they learned from history?
Passage omitted.
The Asahi Piles Lies upon Lies
On October 8, the Japanese edition of The Huffington Post, which partners with the Asahi Shimbun, reported on a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan by Toshihide Tsuda, a professor at Okayama University, claiming that “the incidence of thyroid cancer among children in Fukushima is 20 to 50 times higher.”
His paper is so sloppy that the other major newspapers did not report on it.
During the accident, radioactive iodine, which causes thyroid cancer, was carried northwest by the wind, so the figures should be higher in the northwestern area; yet Tsuda’s paper puts the thyroid cancer incidence rate at approximately twenty times higher there, while it is more than forty times higher in the southern area, where the concentration was lowest.
This indicates that the incidence of cancer is unrelated to the accident.
As the article itself notes, a Fukushima Prefecture review committee revealed that thyroid cancer had been confirmed in a total of 104 people who were under 18 at the time of the accident, but stated that “at present, it is difficult to attribute this to the effects of the nuclear accident,” citing improved detection through screening and “overdiagnosis,” in which cases are diagnosed as positive even though treatment is unnecessary.
Taichiro Yoshino, the reporter who wrote this article, is on secondment from the Asahi Shimbun.
After its nosebleed reports became a laughingstock, the Asahi seems to want to stir up fear over thyroid cancer next, but apparently cannot bring itself to publish this in its main newspaper, so it reports it through affiliated media instead.
Shukan Asahi and AERA publish even more overtly anti-nuclear articles.
In the October 20 evening edition of the Asahi Shimbun, in an article titled “First Workers’ Compensation Recognition for Radiation Exposure Following the Nuclear Accident: Former Male Worker with Leukemia,” reporter Yuri Oiwa writes that “there is a certain causal relationship between radiation exposure incurred while responding to the nuclear accident and the worker’s illness.”
＊I had subscribed to AERA for a long time, until August of last year, and there, too, was a female reporter very much like Yuri Oiwa who once wrote something utterly appalling.
Some readers will surely remember that I criticized how outrageous it was.
In other words, I, too, am convinced that this is the Asahi’s institutional character.＊
Readers who read only the lead will probably think, “So the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident has finally claimed a victim,” but a careful reading reveals that the worker “worked for a TEPCO contractor from 2012 to 2013, installing structures and performing welding work around Units 3 and 4, and was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in January 2014.”
In other words, only a little over a year elapsed between his work at the nuclear plant and the onset of the disease.
A Victim of the Nuclear Accident?
Under the workers’ compensation criteria, leukemia that develops at least one year after work involving radiation qualifies for recognition as an occupational illness, but the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare explains: “This recognition does not scientifically establish a relationship between radiation exposure and health effects.
‘Exposure to five millisieverts or more per year’ is not a threshold for developing leukemia.”
Yet reporter Oiwa writes that “there is a certain causal relationship.”
Exposure exceeding 100 millisieverts is said to increase the lifetime cancer rate by 0.5 percent, but the average time to onset is 25 years.
Even at Chernobyl, cases began appearing five years after the accident.
There has not been a single case anywhere in the world of someone developing leukemia one year after exposure to just five millisieverts.