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Fukushima: 1,600 Dead From Evacuation Stress
seven of five writes: The NYT reports that radiation-related hysteria and mistakes have cost the lives of nearly 1,600 Japanese since the Fukushima disaster. The panic to evacuate, not the radiation itself, led to poor choices such as moving hospital intensive care patients from hospitals to emergency quarters. The government's perception of radiation exposure risk, rather than the actual risk itself, may have caused far more harm than it prevented.
The IAEA report on Fukushima is quite clear that no statistical increase in deaths is likely to be observed. Not for adults, children, or offspring. Even for workers at the site with the highest exposures, there will likely be no observable effects. As you say, with the workers the sample size is small to start with, so that becomes factor
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/P...
Based on our experience with other exposure cases, the estimates of negative radio logical health impacts are always much higher than what we observe in reality. There are two reasons. One is that the models for estimating health effects are conservative, and two is because the estimated exposures are conservative (they assume higher doses to account for uncertainty.). I have no problem with conservative estimation, just as long as they are used correctly. So, yes, statistical deaths are real deaths, statistical illnesses are real illnesses, and thankfully we'll not likely see any from the radio logical effects of Fukushima.
Interestingly, a tidbit is that the children thyroid exposure at Chernobyl was 1000 times that of a child in the Fukushima district. From what I can find, there is still no observed statistical increase in negative health effects associated with those exposures at Chernobyl. But I want to be clear I have not researched that thoroughly.
By repeated layers of watering down, the story has changed from what the research (even their own sources) says - that yes, the accident will be causing many cases of fatal cancers, but we can't prove which ones are due to radiation - into a general sense of "nobody's going to get sick from this accident" in the article.
I think you're interpenetration is a bit off. The story has not changed, and the IAEA report is very good at showing us all of the important considerations and explaining how they apply in the case of Fukushima. It is a matter of taking generic statistical modeling and taking real world factors into account, not a matter of watering things down. The risks from exposures received are extremely small, the at risk population is small, the real world sampling confirms assumptions are conservative, and therefore there is going to be no observable increase statistically.
The report absolutely does not say "nobody's going to get sick from this accident", as you imply. It is worded quite appropriately and clearly that observable statistical impacts are not likely to be found.