Safe levels of reporting?

Sitting it out in Sheffield

Yesterday, Ayumi returned to Japan, our willing canary. We're going to wait until next week, in the hope that the reactor problems are finally resolved, or at least until some internationally agreed consensus on the health risks emerges. Because at the moment there is a worrying disconnect between different news reports, even on the same website (BBC). On the one hand, Fergus Walsh reassures us that life in Tokyo is safer than Cornwall, radiation-wise:

...the extra risk from drinking tap water in Tokyo for a year would be far less than that of someone moving, say, from London to Cornwall for a year.

And there's this piece too, which seeks to convince us (in spite of the garbled syntax early on "But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.")

On the other hand, if this is the case, and everything is well, why have two Japanese tourists coming from Tokyo been hospitalized in China with radiation sickness?

...In another development, two Japanese tourists who arrived in China on a flight from Tokyo are being treated in hospital for high radiation levels. It remains unclear how the two may have become contaminated as neither traveller is reported to have been within 240km of the Fukushima plant, says our correspondent...

Unless we've been lied to by the English tourist board for decades, no two-week Cornish getaway has ever resulted in a trip to the isolation ward of a London hospital. So it is safe to conclude, purely as a matter of logic, that someone is lying now. Given this, one has to ask: cui bono?

Throughout this crisis, the gulf between BBC and NHK reporting has been widening to the point that neither can be considered reliable. I know the line between journalism and propaganda is a shifting one, I know that scientists are often awful communicators (as nicely demonstrated by the quote above!), and journalists are sometimes risibly poor at reporting science. Surely, though, there must be some international monitoring of radiation levels in all parts of the country, and this information could be released, as raw data. That this hasn't happened inevitably raises the suspicion of a cover-up at the highest levels of government. Or dire incompetence. Or both.

Postscript: It's great to read today that Greenpeace monitoring of radiation levels will shortly commence. I can only hope that when they are able to report, their counts tally with the official figures, but I'm not holding my breath...

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