Via Instapundit comes an article by Popular Mechanics about the dangers or lack thereof involving Polonium 210 poisoning.

"There is no health risk from external exposure," says Joseph DeCicco of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "If you walked through it, sat in it, got it on your clothes, you're not going to get sick."

Kathy Shingleton, also health physicist at Lawrence Livermore, said: "If you were sitting on a plane and there was polonium 210 on the armrest, and you put your arm on the polonium for the whole of your trip, you are in no danger."

Polonium, say the experts, is only dangerous if swallowed or inhaled. Once inside the body, it is able to pass through the more delicate internal cell membranes, destroying cells, particularly in the bone marrow.

Thank you Popular Mechanics! A voice of reason among the hysteria that is the news media.

You see, I had been reading, just a little, over the last few days and everything I read, including the Wikipedia piece stated that Polonium could not penetrate the skin. For that matter, one of the initial post-death reports in the media said they were not sure if radiation poisoning had killed Litvinenko until traces were found in his urine and that this particular type of radiation could not penetrate the skin.

Yet even while they stated these things in the stories, each story would swing around to all the places Litvinenko had been in London, the airplanes that had been between London and Russia. Basically, they ignored the facts and have been actively fanning the fear. The very real fear people have of radiation poisoning.

People tend to be worried about this stuff, for good reason, as we saw Litvinenko's death was awful! Who wants this to happen to them? So, people hear "we found traces in this place, that place, the other place"... and they forget that it doesn't matter because they never ingested it in any way.

That makes a piece like this one from the Times a totally irresponsible piece of journalism.

He explained, in an impressive monotone, that this now included 24 locations, four aircraft, 221 destinations and 33,000 passengers. Then he told us, in exactly the same voice, that there was no need for alarm. It must be said that I found this to be alarming in itself. But

Mr Reid was adamant and kept repeating himself. Indeed, “there is no need for alarm” seemed to be his new mantra. Either that, or he was trying to hypnotise us. You may think I’m paranoid but, in this story, anything is possible.

How cute! Ms. Treneman doesn't bother to actually... like... find out facts - no she listens to one man speak and then spills out her ill-informed blather to all the readers of the Times. Does she even bother to check with anyone who is an expert in radiation? Does she even bother to google up the Wikipedia entry which specifically states:

...though they do not penetrate the epidermis and hence are not hazardous if the polonium is outside the body...

None of this is hard to find and as a newspaper writer, whether she is a reporter or an op-ed writer, she has an obligation to the public to find out the facts before she tries to cause a panic.

In the meantime, with stories from all the major news sources making it sound like the whole of London could be radioactive, thousands of people have been needlessly scared. This would be why we need responsible journalists not fear mongers.

Unfortunately, what "sells" is fear. As long as they keep up the stories about possible radiation poisoning, they keep people tuned in. We all know it's about the size of the audience, not the story itself that's important.

Posted by: Teresa in Science at 03:59 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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