Scare lead in the fishwarp today: TOKYO TAP WATER IS TAINTED
Then underneath: "Radiation has caused the city's drinking supply to exceed safety standards for infants.", with a push to page A4. (Sorry, the story is not found on the IndyStar website, which remains one of the most useless news websites I've ever seen, but it can be viewed on Yahoo News.)
Then in the actual story, "Anxiety over food and water supplies soared a day after city officials reported that radioactive iodine in the tap water was measured at levels considered unsafe for babies over the long term." (Emphasis mine.)
Then almost at the end of the story as printed in the IndyStar: "'Even if you drink this water for one year, it will not affect people's health', Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said." (Again, emphasis mine.)
As it turns out, the Yahoo News version of the article is far superior and about twice as long as the edited-down version IndyStar printed. It includes near the end the following paragraph:
The amounts are too low to pose any real risk, even to infants who are being fed water-based formula or to breast-fed infants whose mothers drink tap water, said Dr. Harold Swartz, a professor of radiology and medicine at Dartmouth Medical School in the U.S.
Oh, really. Story in The Register this morning:
[...] a baby could drink milk containing 100 Bq/l of radio-iodine for a year without ill effects. The same dose could be sustained by drinking the Tokyo tapwater (assuming continuous iodine-131 levels at the maximum so far seen) for a bit under six months.You'd really struggle to achieve that, however, as iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days. Most of what was in the plant when it shut down Friday before last has now turned into inoffensive Xenon, and the heat which drove initial emissions to atmosphere is now a small fraction of what it was in the first days of the incident. Levels in the water can be expected to peak soon and then drop, fast at first and then slowly, to almost nothing over a six-month timespan.
A little perspective, IndyStar? Maybe you could provide that perspective rather than just slavishly reprinting selectively-edited AP feeds. Then you might actually deserve the appelation, "newspaper".
