BERTELL: Radioactivity and the Gradual Extinction of Life?

[Oscar]

BERTELL: The Future of Planet Earth. Are We the Last Surviving Generations? Radioactivity and the Gradual Extinction of Life?

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-future ... fe/5361283 ]

By Dr. Rosalie Bertell

Global Research, December 12, 2013

How grateful we must be for this magnificent gift of life and all we have needed to sustain it over the last hundreds of thousands of years! Yet, today it is under threats never felt before in its entire unfolding journey!“ - Rosalie Bertell (Slowly Wrecking Our Planet, 2010)

We are presented with the chance of an awakening from the deceptive dream of a righteous way how things are working. We have the opportunity to recognize that in the end what counts are only the recognition and practice of the joy of living and the love of life! However, this life as it is possible on this earth – unique in our cosmos – is incredibly endangered today. If we manage to recognize this, then paradoxically we can grow toward the ability of perceiving and experiencing this joy and this love anew or maybe for the first time in its full dimension – and this time without any naivety, but rather as an answer to the question about what we can actually really do in face of this fear provoking threat towards life and the earth: Namely to stand up for them – beyond feelings of fear and anxiety – what else!?“ - Claudia von Werlhof (Two Years Of Planetary Movement for Mother Earth: The Fear and – What to do?“, 6th Letter of Information of the PMME, June 2012)

Rosalie Bertell and The Future of Planet Earth

Interviewer: I think you did a lot of research about the radiation, even when it is a low radiation where usually it is said: “Don’t worry, no problem at all”. What have you found out about the effects of low radiation in the long run?

Bertell: Well, my background is as a researcher. And I started by studying the effects of medical diagnostics x-ray, dental x-ray and chest x-ray. We had a huge population that was followed over three years. So we had about 64 million person years in the study, it is very big. If you have a big population like that and you have measurable x-ray exposures, you can see what happens in the population. I am coming from looking at medical x-rays, and then seeing environmental pollution as bigger.

With many other researchers studied the atomic bomb and they go down to these low levels and I said: Oh it´s not anything! So a lot depends on your perspective. So when you look at a large population and you start saying and you ask what happens when they were exposed to radiation, I think generally the question has been wrong. People ask: How many cancers does it cost. I don’t think that is the answer. Because if you look at live in general, the most obvious thing is we grow old. And we grow old in a kind of systematic way and even the cancers are old age diseases. So what I did was to change the question. And I said: How much medical x-ray would you need to be exposed to so that you get the equivalent of one year of natural aging. That is a very different research question. In order to measure natural aging I use the non-lymphatic leukaemia. They go up in a large population like compound interest, ranging from about age 15 every year there is a 3% to 4 % increase in the rate of the non-lymphatic leukaemia. It is just when you have money in the bank that interest is not very big when you are 16 or 20 years old, but by the time you get to 60 that is a large amount of money, it is also a large rate of this cancer. That is why they come at the end.

So I used that as my measuring stick and asked: how much medical x-ray would be the equivalent? I actually measured the aging effect of having dental x-rays or chest x-ray. What was surprising to me: It’s the same amount as you would get background in a year. So it didn’t make any difference if you got that radiation exposure very fast, because you got a chest x-ray or whether you had it slowly over a year. You still in terms of vulnerability you were aged. What that means then practically: If you are in your 20s or 30s and you have an accident and need extensive x-rays probably you won’t feel much in terms of the difference. However if you are vulnerable like 60, 70 years old, the annual level of what you experience, you will experience more vulnerability from the x-rays because it is a percentage and a higher rate if incidents. So you are more vulnerable as you get older.

And so I started looking at young people who got leukaemia and I mean the cases under 45 years of age. And I found within certain groups they are something like six times as likely to get leukaemia in that younger age group. And if you have young people with things like diabetes arthritis, often we associate them with old age. There it is 12 times as likely to be in a young group to have leukaemia. So there are some signals to us that a person is prematurely aged and those people are more vulnerable to radiation exposure.

It’s like they have already moved further on the list. And it’s not exactly medical x-ray, because for example with people who have heart-disease, some are treated more aggressively with respect to x-ray. Some people with heart-disease are x-rayed every year. Other have an x-ray may be five or six years and it was the once who had the x-rays more frequently that came up with the leukaemia. So I started moving people at the age line according to their own personal record of medical diagnostic x-ray. And it explains very many biological phenomena. There seems to be a whole lot of aging processes connected with this.

4b354) One of the most remarkable things is very often in radiation studies that men and women radiation measurements are different. I put them on the exposure age which was your ordinary age plus your medical exposure. When I did them with exposure age many women were the same and I found that it had much to do with the cultural difference in the use of x-rays. Many young men had x-rays because of sports. They had all these sport injuries. Women don’t start to get x-rays until they are pregnant. And then it is mostly dental. And then you get to the midlife-crisis. So where is a difference in the way we treat men and women and boys and girls with x-rays.

Interviewer: Could this relate also to this kind of radioactive radiation which we have through atomic testing or Chernobyl?

Bertell: When we get into the nuclear industry whether it is uranium mining or milling or the reactors or use of weapons or even the radioactive waste, you are into particular radiation which we can either breathe in or take in in water and food. It can stay in the body and differentially expose some organs and not other organs. So, you get these small amounts of radiation operating in the body, and you get what I would call „differential aging“. So many of the problems we see come from who long this material stays in the body and where it goes.

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That´s the reason to say: the most important thing to do is to eliminate the military globally. The military is one of the most rapid consumer of resources. If you got rid the military globally you would immediately get rid of the ecological deficit, that we are running up every year. This is buying us time to set up a better way to live on this planet. Yes, we need globalisation in the heads. We don’t need Mono-culture, but we need to learn how to live together on this earth, how to use conflict resolution in place of military, yes we need a police-force, yes we need laws and courts and that sort of thing. But we don‘t need military. Military is an abnormality. It is destroying our culture, it is destroying our environment, it is destroying everything we want. And it is time to get rid of it.

Interviewer: 7 Generations?

Bertell: I would maximize the health of this beautiful living planet as much as I could and I would say: I give you this with love. Keep it and give it to as many generations as you can. Life can be good. And live is really a beautiful gift. None of us has asked for it. None of us deserves it. It shouldn’t be something that is a disaster for everybody. It should be something enjoyable and that means that we have to do it differently from the way we are doing it now. For most people live is a terrible thing. People are committing suicide, because it is so ugly for them. That is not life. That is not the way it should be. No other species is going around committing suicide like humans. So there is something very radically wrong with the way we are behaving.

Corrections and Editing by Planetary Movement for Mother Earth, www.pbme-online.org