Dr. Robert Emery Disputes Joe Mangano's Findings on Radiation and Fukushima

Just a few minutes ago, I received the following statement from Dr. Robert Emery, Vice President for Safety, Health, Environment & Risk Management at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston concerning Dr. Joseph Mangano's recent study on fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy facility reaching the U.S.

“We aggressively monitored for the presence of environmental radioactivity in Houston following the Fukushima event and worked closely with local public health authorities in the event we detected any threat to public health. We never detected any elevated radiation levels. I don’t see any evidence to supports the assertion made by this report that the additional 484 deaths in Houston in 2011 could in any way be related to radioactivity from Fukushima - we never detected any.”

"Moreover the study bases its conclusion on the comparison of data from deaths in the U.S. in 2010 and 2011. Using this method you really can’t determine the specific cause of any increase in deaths over the two years. Perhaps the most important question is: what did the 148,395 U.S. citizens die of in 2010, the year before the Japanese earthquake? Most likely the overwhelming causes were heart disease, cancer, and stroke. I believe this is likely the case in 2011 as well. I also believe our finite public health resources are better spent on the issues we know are causing people to die rather than being diverted to explore hypothetical projections"

It ought to be clear by now that Mangano's claims are being broadly discredited by the wider scientific community. Click here, here and here for our recent posts on how independent 3rd party voices are warning the public to disregard Mangano's research.

Joe Mangano's Credibility Takes Another Body Blow

This time, the sledgehammer is delivered courtesy of Barbara Feder Ostrov's Health Journalism Blog. Like plenty of other folks, she was shocked at Joe Mangano's claims -- ones that he backed off from when under questioning from MedPage Today -- so she talked to some long-time medical journalists.

Here's what Ivan Oransky of Reuters Health had to say about Mangano's research:

I do use impact factor to judge journals, while accepting that it's an imperfect measure that is used in all sorts of inappropriate ways (and, for the sake of full disclosure, is a Thomson Scientific product, as in Thomson Reuters). I find it helpful to rank journals within a particular specialty.

[...]

I looked up the journal in question, and it's actually ranked 45th out of 58 in the Health Policy and Services category (in the social sciences rankings) and 59th out of 72 in the Health Care Sciences & Services category (in the science rankings).

Here's Gary Schwitzer of Health News Review:

Journalists who live on a steady diet of journal articles almost by definition promote a rose-colored view of progress in research if they don't grasp and convey the publication bias in many journals for positive findings. Negative or null findings may not be viewed as sexy enough. Or they may be squelched prior to submission. While perhaps not a factor in this one case, it nonetheless drives home the point to journalists about the need to critically evaluate studies.

I'm afraid I have more bad news for Mangano. Who's going to tell Christie Brinkley?

Mike Moyer of Scientific American Debunks Joe Mangano Again

Mike Moyer, the writer at Scientific American who so expertly debunked Joe Mangano's "research" in June, had a chance to read the latest Mangano study that claimed 14,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to fallout from Fukushima.

The verdict: it's just another flawed study.

No attempt is made at providing systematic error estimates, or error estimates of any kind. No attempt is made to catalog any biases that may have crept into the analysis, though a cursory look finds biases a-plenty (the authors are anti-nuclear activists unaffiliated with any research institution). The analysis assumes that the plume arrived on U.S. shores, spread everywhere, instantly, and started killing people immediately. It assumes that the “excess” deaths after March 20 are a real signal, not just a statistical aberration, and that every one of them is due to Fukushima radiation.

Of course, as we pointed out yesterday, Mangano was forced to back off that last claim when pressed by a reporter from MedPage Today.

Back to Moyer ...

The publication of such sloppy, agenda-driven work is a shame. Certainly radiation from Fukushima is dangerous, and could very well lead to negative health effects—even across the Pacific. The world needs to have a serious discussion about what role nuclear power should play in a power-hungry post-Fukushima world. But serious, informed, fact-based debate is a difficult enough goal to achieve without having to shout above noise like this.

Amen, brother.

Joseph Mangano Contradicts His Own Press Release on Fukushima Research

Our readers will recall that on Friday afternoon that we were alerted to the impending release of a study authored by Joseph Mangano and Dr. Janette Sherman on the alleged effects of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi incident here in the U.S.

Earlier today, Mangano and company held a teleconference to announce their findings:

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.

Sounds scary, doesn't it? Then again, only a few hours later, Mangano admitted in an interview with MedPage Today that the results of his research weren't quite as definitive as his press release would have led folks to believe:

But he (Managno) told MedPage Today that the researchers can't rule out factors other than the Fukushima radiation that might have accounted for the excess.

"There are probably a variety of factors that could be linked to this excess of 14,000 deaths," he said.

Huh? In any case, it's clear that the scientific community doesn't think terribly much of Mangano and his study. As luck would have it, MedPage Today also talked to Richard L. Morin, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida:

On the contrary, any link between the deaths and the radiation released by the reactors is "very, very unlikely" simply because the levels are low, according to Richard Morin, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla.

Morin told MedPage Today that such an acute effect would be unlikely, unless radiation levels were four or five orders of magnitude higher than those reported by Mangano and Sherman, and the whole body of the victim was exposed.

Typically, he said, the effect of low-level ionizing radiation doesn't appear until years after the exposure.

Morin, who is chair of the American College of Radiology's safety committee, said an earlier public report by the authors on the same issue -- preceding the journal article -- "has not been taken seriously by the scientific community."

He added it's important to remember that "association doesn't imply causation.

It's been more than six years since I wrote my first post on Mangano's antics. As I wrote at the time, eight states have investigated Mangano's claims and all eight refused to validate them. One wonders why reporters even bother to talk to him anymore when his work has been so thoroughly debunked.

Note to Reporters: Be Sure to Fact Check Joseph Mangano, Janette Sherman and Robert Alvarez

Late this afternoon, it came to our attention that Joseph Mangano, Janette Sherman and Robert Alvarez will be holding a news conference on Monday morning (December 19) concerning a new study they've done about how Americans might be affected by radiation released into the atmosphere from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan.

While we haven't seen the article as of yet and can't comment on it, our readers should know that reliable third parties have reviewed the work of all three authors in the past and found it to be fatally flawed.

Here's what the New Jersey Commission on Radiation Protection had to say about Mangano's "Tooth Fairy" project:

The Commission is of the opinion that "Radioactive Strontium-90 in Baby Teeth of New Jersey Children and the Link with Cancer: A Special Report," is a flawed report, with substantial errors in methodology and invalid statistics. As a result, any information gathered through this project would not stand up to the scrutiny of the scientific community. There is also no evidence to support the allegation that the State of New Jersey has a problem with the release of Sr-90 into the environment from nuclear generating plants: more than 30 years of environmental monitoring data refute this.

In June, Michael Moyer of Scientific American had this to say about a study by Mangano and Sherman on radiation and Fukushima:

[A] check reveals that the authors’ statistical claims are critically flawed—if not deliberate mistruths.

[...]

Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering.

This is not to say that the radiation from Fukushima is not dangerous, nor that we shouldn’t closely monitor its potential to spread (we should). But picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics. Beware those who would confuse the latter with the former.

As for Mr. Alvarez, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had this to say about one of his papers on the safety of spent fuel pools:

The NRC staff has reviewed the paper, "Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power- Reactor Fuel in the United States," April 21, 2003, Robert Alvarez, et al., (published in Science and Global Security, spring 2003) and concludes that it fails to make the case for its central recommendation.

[...]

Our review of the paper indicates that it is a deficient study of the hazards associated with the storage of spent fuel. Many of the 114 cited references are NRC studies or NRC contracted studies conducted for a variety of purposes, and most are not applicable to terrorist attacks.

Members of the press should take care to challenge the findings announced on Monday, and to be sure to contact NEI or other third party experts to review the validity of the study, rather than simply rebroadcast its findings.

Scientific American Blog Uses Simple Math to Expose Flawed Radiation Essay by Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman

Michael Moyer over at SciAm’s Observations blog made the easy calculations to discover how “physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano” manipulated radiation data to scare folks about the Fukushima accident. After digging into the Centers for Disease Control data, here’s what Moyer found:

a check reveals that the authors’ statistical claims are critically flawed—if not deliberate mistruths.

…

Only by explicitly excluding data from January and February were Sherman and Mangano able to froth up their specious statistical scaremongering.

This is not to say that the radiation from Fukushima is not dangerous (it is), nor that we shouldn’t closely monitor its potential to spread (we should). But picking only the data that suits your analysis isn’t science—it’s politics. Beware those who would confuse the latter with the former.

It’s not too hard to bust holes in Mangano’s “essays,” we’ve been doing it for years. Great to see SciAm dig into the numbers.