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Creation of the "Special District" system for medical research has been in discussion between the national government and the Fukushima prefectural government, and the outline of the system has been revealed. It includes: loosening the regulations of the Japanese Pharmaceutical Affairs Law only in Fukushima Prefecture and thus encouraging new entrants to the medical equipment manufacturing and sales; setting up data centers for medical cases and research centers for recurrent cancer at hospitals in Fukushima, which will attract pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment companies and medical researchers to Fukushima. The government is expected to allocate 10 billion yen (US$130 million) in the 3rd supplementary budget for the fiscal 2011.

10 billion yen to set up pharmaceutical research and data collection centers so that pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries flock to Fukushima. The government is clearly looking forward to a thriving medical industry in Fukushima with abundant (slightly over 2 million) research subjects of all ages. From the above short description, it doesn't seem to be about treating people who will come down with radiation sickness. It is about collecting data and experimentation.

Since the national government is fiscally broke, the money will eventually come from the Japanese taxpayers, who will be made accomplice to this human experiment in Fukushima. Dr. Shunichi "Damashita (who conned, lied, tricked, duped, take your pick)"

: Dr. Helen Caldicott

All areas of Japan should be tested to assess how radioactive the soil and water are because the winds can blow the radioactive pollution hundreds of miles from the point source at Fukushima. Under no circumstances should radioactive rubbish and debris be incinerated as this simply spreads the isotopes far and wide to re-concentrate in food and fish. All batches of food must be adequately tested for specific radioactive elements using spectrometers. No radioactive food must be sold or consumed, nor must radioactive food be diluted for sale with non-radioactive food as radioactive elements re-concentrate in various bodily organs. All water used for human consumption should be tested weekly. All fish caught off the east coast must be tested for years to come. All people, particularly children, pregnant women and women of childbearing age still living in high radiation zones should be immediately evacuated to non-radioactive areas of Japan. All people who have been exposed to radiation from Fukushima – particularly babies, children, immunosuppressed, old people and others — must be medically thoroughly and routinely examined for malignancy, bone marrow suppression, diabetes, thyroid abnormalities, heart disease, premature aging, and cataracts for the rest of their lives and appropriate treatment instituted. Leukemia will start to manifest within the next couple of years, peak at five years and solid cancers will start appearing 10 to 15 years post-accident and will continue to increase in frequency in this generation over the next 70 to 90 years. All physicians and medical care providers in Japan must read and examine Chernobyl–Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment by the New York Academy of Sciences to understand the true medical gravity of the situation they face. I also suggest with humility that doctors in particular but also politicians and the general public refer to my web page, nuclearfreeplanet.org for more information, that they listen to the interviews related to Fukushima and Chernobyl on my radio program at ifyoulovethisplanet.org and they read my book NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ANSWER. The international medical community and in particular the WHO must be mobilized immediately to assist the Japanese medical profession and politicians to implement this massive task outlined above. The Japanese government must be willing to accept international advice and help. As a matter of extreme urgency Japan must request and receive international advice and help from the IAEA and the NRC in the U.S., and nuclear specialists from Canada, Europe, etc., to prevent the collapse of Fukushima Dai-ichi Unit 4 and the spent fuel pool if there was an earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale.As the fuel pool crashed to earth it would heat and burn causing a massive radioactive release 10 times larger than the release from Chernobyl. There is no time to spare and at the moment the world community sits passively by waiting for catastrophe to happen. The international and Japanese media must immediately start reporting the facts from Japan as outlined above. Not to do so is courting global disaster.

Japanese government lifted evacuating area from Minami soma shi on 9/30/2011. However,about 30,000 of 71500 people have not come back yet. Medical staff escaped too. Hospitals are suffering from shortage of man power though they should evacuate actually. Minamisoma city hospital is one of the major hospitals ,where is only 23 km from the Fukushima plants.

In this hospital ,doctors and nurse evacuated too. Full time doctor ; 14 → 8 Nurse ; 136 → 100 Beds ; 230 → 100 Apart from Minami soma city hospital , 2 of 8 hospitals were closed , 13 of 39 clinics were closed too.

There were about 900 medical staff but now it’s only 300 in total. Remaining medical staff are thinking that’s because the national support is not enough. Fukushima local government therefore has decided to spend 2 billion of 12 billion yen of tax allocation grant for medical care on these areas. It will be spent to re-employ evacuated doctors or hire new doctors.

The official journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), "Canadian Medical Association Journal" is a peer-reviewed scientific journal. On their website, there is an article dated December 21, 2011 which severely criticizes the Japanese government's response (or lack thereof) to the nuclear disaster which has just been declared "over" by the current Noda administration.Written by Lauren Vogel of CMAJ quoting medical experts, the article states:The Japanese government has been "lying through their teeth" ever since the March 11 accident;The Japanese government hasn't disclosed enough information for the citizens to make informed decision, with “extreme lack of transparent, timely and comprehensive communication”;

The response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster by the Japanese government is far worse than the response to the Chernobyl accident by the Soviet Union government;The annual radiation exposure limit for the general public of 20 millisieverts is "unconscionable", and there has been no government "in recent decades that's been willing to accept such a high level of radiation-related risk for its population"

Dr. Helen Caldicott appeared on the LINK TV program Earth Focus to discuss the Fukushima crisis and other nuclear issues. Caldicott received her medical degree from the University of Adelaide Medical School. In 1977 she joined the staff of the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, and taught pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School from 1977 to 1978. She worked to establish the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. -Wikipedia At 2:00 in: We’ll start seeing lung cancer, I think, 2-5 years from now

Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count

An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.

The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks.The IJHS article will be published Tuesday and will be available online as of 11 a.m. EST at http://www.radiation.org . Just six days after the disastrous meltdowns struck four reactors at Fukushima on March 11, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over American shores. Subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S. The highest detected levels of Iodine-131 in precipitation in the U.S. were as follows (normal is about 2 picocuries I-131 per liter of water): Boise, ID (390); Kansas City (200); Salt Lake City (190); Jacksonville, FL (150); Olympia, WA (125); and Boston, MA (92)

In Japan, some of the (most of the ) hospitals refuse to see patients who are sick from radiation. Because the connection between the symptoms and the radiation is not clear, it will never be clear ever. The picture on the top of the page is a notice of an academic medical center in Tokyo. It says, “we do not serve any tests for radiation exposure or treatment for irradiation”. The picture below is a document distributed from Japan radiological society to an academic medical center in western Japan. It says, currently radiation level is too low to affect your health condition. Even in the 20~30 km area, if you are in a building, it can not be harmful.

It is becoming harder and harder to find a proper medical institute to provide right treatment.

This week’s guest is Wladimir Wertelecki, the founder and chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics and Birth Defects Center of the University of South Alabama, in the U.S. Prior to his training in Medical Genetics at Harvard University Medical School, Dr. Wertelecki trained in Pediatrics at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Washington University. Later, he served as Senior Surgeon, U.S. Public Health Commission Corps at the Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute [...] He has extensively studied the effects of the radiation released by the Chernobyl meltdown on public health, particularly in children [...]

Wertelecki: I did give lectures in Tokyo recently and I met people from a variety of Universities that attended these events. My sense is that the path followed in Japan closely resembles the path that evolved after Chernobyl. And there are more regrettables than nonregrettables. It seems like frankly it’s difficult to understand what’s going on and what’s not going on. From my point of view the absolute priority is women of reproductive age… No registry of pregnant women as far as I know… very little concentration on these aspects… everything is concentrated on cancer…children beyond the scope of thyroid cancer are very important…

Wertelecki: There’s a team of expert son birds and ornithology form France, very distinguished Danish ornithologist who found in Chernobyl area very, very major disturbing findings that exactly the same is happening in Fukushima. In other words these birds cannot migrate because they become exhausted… they find microcephaly just like we do, they find all kind of instability like random spotted changes to fur, which are local mutations of course on so on and so on.

Yomiuri Shinbun (10/2/2011) reports:

Minister of Recovery and Reconstruction Hirano met with Governor Yuhei Sato on October 2 at the Fukushima prefectural government and told the governor that the national government will allocate 500 billion yen (US$6.5 billion) to the recovery effort in Fukushima Prefecture in the 3rd supplementary budget of the national government for the 2011 fiscal year. Of 500 billion yen, 350 billion yen will go to the special fund that the Fukushima prefectural government will set up in order to revive the local economy.

However, Minister Hirano said "This (amount of the special fund) is just a start. We will continue our effort", meaning the national government may add to the fund as necessary.

Almost 1,500 recent tweets, most all from Japan: Twitter Trackbacks for http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/chikako_5155/7006995.html – 2011年11月7日 13:05 – ウェブ魚拓 [megalodon.jp] on Topsy.com

In addition to regulating commercial nuclear power reactors that generate 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, the NRC also regulates much smaller reactors used for research, training and development. These “research and test reactors,” often called RTRs or non-power reactors, contribute to almost every field of science including physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology, archeology, and environmental sciences. Most are located at universities or colleges. (The NRC does not regulate research reactors run by the Department of Energy.) The most common use for these small reactors is for experiments. One widely used type of experiment is neutron scattering. Radiation from the reactor is directed at the material to be studied. The manner in which the radiation interacts and bounces off, or scatters, from the material provides information on structure and properties. Neutron scattering is an important tool in experiments dealing with superconductors, polymers, metals, and proteins.

Neutron radiography is another experimental technique. It is similar to medical or dental X-rays. These experiments are used to determine structural integrity and provide quality control for aerospace, automotive and medical components. NRC experts inspect each RTR periodically to ensure they are being operated according to the agency’s safety and security requirements, and the facility’s own license conditions. The NRC uses a graded approach in its inspection program so there are less frequent and detailed inspections at facilities that pose a lower risk.

There are two types of inspection programs for operating research and test reactors: • For reactors licensed to operate at power levels of 2 megawatts or greater, the inspection program is completed annually. • For reactors licensed to operate at power levels below 2 megawatts, the inspection program is completed every two years.

A leading biophysicist has cast a critical light on the government’s reassurances that Americans were never at risk from Fukushima fallout, saying “we really don’t know for sure.”

When radioactive fallout from Japan’s nuclear disaster began appearing in the United States this spring, the Obama Administration’s open-data policy obligated the government to inform the public, in some detail, what was landing here.

Covering the story, I watched the government pursue what appeared to be two strategies to minimize public alarm: