Mission

The Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization, established by scientists and physicians dedicated to understanding the relationships between low-level, nuclear radiation and public health.

RPHP's mission includes:

• Research: Studying the links between low-level radiation and world-wide increases in diseases, especially cancer and those affecting the newborn and children and to become the leading, world-wide source of information on radiation and public health issues.
  
  
• Education: Publishing the results of research dealing with the impact of low-level radiation on public health and to disseminate this information to the public, media, policy makers and the scientific community.
  
  
• Public awareness: Promoting public awareness and responsible public policy related to radiation and public health, in the areas of freedom of information...objective medical and scientific investigation... institutional accountability...independent oversight...and responsible public health and environmental policy.

History and Accomplishments of the Radiation and Public Health Project

RPHP was founded in 1988 as a fiscally sponsored project of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice by Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman as an outgrowth of their work at Public Data Access, Inc. In 1995, it was established as an independent non-profit 501(c)3 organization after many years of work by Jay Gould, Ernest Sternglass, and others.

Given RPHP's threefold mission in the areas of research, education and public awareness, the history of RPHP can best be traced through its books and articles on radiation and nuclear issues--by Jay Gould, Ben Goldman, Ernest Sternglass, Joseph Mangano, Bill McDonnell, Janette Sherman and Jerry Brown.

During the first half century of the Nuclear Age a growing body of medical and scientific evidence has emerged to demonstrate a probable causal link between low-level internal radiation from the ingestion of man-made fission products and world-wide increases in immune deficiency diseases, especially cancer and those affecting the newborn. RPHP has assembled much of the epidemiological evidence documenting these links.

Five books published by RPHP research associates summarize hundreds of articles in peer-reviewed journals dealing with these impacts of ingested, low-level fission products--products which did not exist in nature prior to the Nuclear Age. In addition to the effects upon the immune response of all age groups, the very young have been especially affected. RPHP has repeatedly pointed out the radiation-induced damage apparent in official vital statistics, tracing changes in infant mortality rates and underweight live births in the postwar period, especially during the aboveground nuclear test years of the 1950s and the 1960s.

RPHP has also been able to track the radiation-induced damage done to the hormonal and immune systems of the 80 million baby boomers born between 1945 and 1965 in each of the post war decades, revealing the various epidemiological anomalies:  In the 1950s, children born after the enormous initial exposure to nuclear fission products began to experience epidemic increases in childhood cancer in the ages 5 to 9.

In USA Newborn Deterioration in the Nuclear Age: 1945-1965 , RPHP found

...a cumulated excess of about 1 million infant deaths over the 50 year postwar period, attributable to exposure to all post-1945 releases of chemical and radioactive pollutants.

In 1963, when children born in the traumatic initial year of 1945 reached the age of 18, there began a mysterious 20-year decline in Scholastic Aptitude Scores (SAT), which only improved when the tests were taken by those born after the cessation of aboveground superpower nuclear bomb tests, which had exploded the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs between 1945 and 1963.

With the onset of another wave of fallout in the form of accidental and 'normal' releases of low-level radiation from civilian nuclear power reactors, rapidly coming on line in the 1970s, RPHP found a linkage to the emergence of immune deficiency diseases in the 1980s, including AIDS, as well as early breast cancer (for women baby boomers reaching age 35).

Concerning America's cancer epidemic, RPHP has analyzed official National Cancer Institute, age-adjusted, breast and prostate cancer mortality rates, available since 1950 for every county in the United States, and demonstrated highly significant correlations between high cancer death rates and proximity to nuclear reactors.

In The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors, RPHP showed that of the over 3,000 counties in the United States, women living in about 1,300 nuclear counties (located within 10 0 miles of a reactor) are at the greatest risk of dying of breast cancer.