Radiation and Public Health Project

Radiation and Public Health Project is a nonprofit educational and scientific organization founded in 1985 by Jay M. Gould, a statistician and epidemiologist, and Ernest Sternglass. The "shoestring organization" with "offices mainly on [Joseph J. Mangano's] kitchen table" was established to examine the relationships between low-level nuclear radiation and public health and question the safety of nuclear power.

As of November 2010, Radiation and Public Health Project members have published 27 medical journal articles on health risks from radioactive exposures to nuclear reactors and weapons tests. RPHP studies have claimed elevated rates of childhood, thyroid, and other cancers near reactors.

According to a 2003 article in The New York Times, the group's work has been controversial, and had little credibility with the scientific establishment. Similarly the work of the Radiation and Public Health Project has been criticized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: "Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies do not support the RPHP's claims. NRC finds there is little or no credibility in the RHP's studies". In an April 2014 article in Popular Science, Sarah Epstein referred to the group's work as "junk science" and disputed the group's peer-reviewed publications as being insufficiently evaluated.

A set of 85,000 teeth that had been collected by Dr. Louise Reiss and her colleagues as part of the Baby Tooth Survey were uncovered in 2001 and given to the Radiation and Public health Project. By tracking the individuals who had participated in the tooth-collection project, the RHPR published results in a 2010 issue of the International Journal of Health Service that claimed that those children who later died of cancer before the age of 50 had levels of strontium 90 in their stored baby teeth that was twice the level of those who were still alive at 50. This paper was criticized by Stephen Musolino, a health physicist and specialist in radiation protection at Brookhaven National Laboratory, as it "confuses correlation with causation" and in their opinion the authors of the paper are "ice-cream epidemiologists".

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