WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

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Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

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Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

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Wall Street flat, losses trimmed after data

PARIS, March 1 (Reuters) - Alex Ferguson's philosophy is behind the longevity of Manchester United's homegrown players, says Paris St Germain midfielder David Beckham. The former England captain and United player is still active at 37, having joined PSG on a five-month loan at the end of January. Former team mate Phil Neville, 36, plays at Everton and the 39-year-old Ryan Giggs, who started his youth career at Manchester City but ended it at United, is still at Old Trafford after signing his first professional contract there in 1990. ...

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At War Blog: Group Seeks Out and Helps Homeless Veterans

Combat zones exist in many different places. For Joe Leal, the founder of the Vet Hunters Project, an all-volunteer group of veterans who have made it their mission to track down homeless comrades, the battlefield is a lone soldier living in his truck in the wake of a home foreclosure, or a veteran living in a dark, deafening homeless encampment secreted under a freeway.

“You know the expression ‘never leave the fallen behind’?” Mr. Leal said one recent afternoon, barreling down the highway in his typical style after spending the morning on the phone calming a distraught vet. “Homelessness is the equivalent of leaving a buddy on the battlefield. They’re heroes in the shadows.”

The group, which takes an aggressive “911 attitude” to homelessness, fans out to America’s forgotten places — bridge underpasses, dry river beds, bus stop shelters, even the concrete pads of subdivision houses that were never built. Started in 2010, the “vetwork,” as Mr. Leal likes to call it, now has 20 chapters around the country, with 113 active volunteers in California alone, who subsidize the work out of their own pockets. In an article Thursday, I write about the project’s work to with homeless female veterans, who are going without housing at higher rates than male veterans.

Among the ranks of the project’s volunteers are military families with spare housing and deployed soldiers who make their empty homes available to homeless vets while they are away.

Mr. Leal, who is something of a human Eveready battery, started the project in memory of his friend Master Sgt. Kelly Bolor, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2003. He and Mr. Leal served together in Iraq, where Sgt. Bolor, who was of Hawaiian descent, “would pull out his ukulele and sing to us when we were down,” Mr. Leal recalled.

Mr. Leal has had his own brush with homelessness, living in shelters with his family as a child — often separated due to restrictions on children — and then in public housing in Ontario, outside Los Angeles. “I watched my father do his best to make sure everything was O.K.,” Mr. Leal said of David Jimenez, the stepfather who raised him. Mr. Jimenez was killed by a hit-and-run driver when Mr. Leal was 25 years old.

Mr. Leal orchestrates much of the project out of the 115th Combat Service Support Battalion in South El Monte, where he is a reservist. “Soldiers won’t tell you their problems,” Master Sgt. Barry Marshall observed of the challenges of reaching homeless veterans. “It’s suck it up and drive on.”

Although the project encourages homeless veterans to seek help with the Department of Veterans Affairs, it can act on a moment’s notice, Mr. Leal said, because he and his cohorts have established relationships with city and county agencies serving the homeless as well as community organizations.

When the husband of one of their clients, Monica Figueroa, returned from multiple deployments, including Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq, the couple wound up homeless, living with their son amid oil and solvents in an auto-body shop owned by his family. They called Mr. Leal, who found them an apartment through Inland Temporary Homes, a community organization in San Bernardino that provides temporary housing and support services for homeless families.

First Sgt. Steve Kreider, now a reserve adviser stationed at the Middletown, Conn., Reserve Center, was one the project’s first volunteers. He participated in a cross-country bike ride in 2011 that was a fact-finding mission and an effort to raise public awareness. “That really opened up our eyes,” Sergeant Kreider said. “You think this only happens in New York or Los Angeles. But when you get to Kansas and see a homeless vet, you realize ‘holy moly,’ this is a bigger problem. It’s a travesty.”

The project helps out with official homeless counts, including one for the state of Connecticut and another for greater Los Angeles. In a count in Connecticut last February, accomplished with the help of 70 cadet volunteers from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, the group located 25 homeless veterans. “They often won’t have a photo I.D.,” Sergeant Kreider observes. “But if you ask them for their DD214, their honorable discharge order, 90 percent of the time they’ll have it. It’s a matter of pride.”

Thus far, the project is financed by the volunteers themselves, operating on a budget of some $50,000. Mr. Leal has about 2,000 volunteers and counting, enlisting even nonveterans living in homeless encampments in the cause. The group will sometimes intervene with car payments, traffic tickets, medication and other aspects of daily life that can sometimes become tipping points into homelessness.

“We don’t accept defeat, ma’am,” he explained after a characteristically long day in the field. “That’s not an option.”

Related Story: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home

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Tamera Mowry-Housley: Let Post-Baby Body Pressure Go

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/27/2013 at 04:00 PM ET

Scott Kirkland/Picturegroup

Stunning in a white dress by Black Halo, Tamera Mowry-Housley returned to the red carpet Thursday for the first time since delivering son Aden in November.

“I have all of these curves I didn’t have before,” the new mom — with twin sister Tia Mowry-Hardrict by her side at the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards Luncheon – tells PEOPLE. ”I wanted to show them off!”

However, she admits her new figure did take some getting used to.

“When I see people like Claire Danes and Megan Fox I think, ‘My body won’t do that!’ My boobs are in my face, I have stretch marks,” Mowry-Housley, 34, says of the post-baby bodies of her fellow actresses.

“There’s a lot of pressure, but you just have to just let it go.”

Adds a Rachel Roy-clad Mowry-Hardrict, “After I had my son [Cree, 20 months], I looked at women like that and I questioned myself. I couldn’t understand how people were on a beach in a bikini two months after they had a baby. I went to my OB-GYN because I thought something was wrong with me. I decided to look up to women like Pink instead. She took her time.”

One of Mowry-Housley’s tricks to feeling more comfortable is channeling Christina Hendricks. “She’s a woman who knows how to show off her curves in a very positive and beautiful way,” she notes.

“My husband [Adam Housley] keeps telling me to own my curves because he thinks it’s sexy,” adds Mowry-Housley. “I just birthed a human being and that was hard, so I am enjoying this. I want to represent a normal woman who just had a baby. This is who I am.”

– Jessica Herndon

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WHO: Small cancer risk after Fukushima accident

LONDON (AP) — People exposed to the highest doses of radiation during Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011 may have a slightly higher risk of cancer but one so small it probably won't be detectable, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday.

A group of experts convened by the agency assessed the risk of various cancers based on estimates of how much radiation people at the epicenter of the nuclear disaster received, namely those directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, a rural agricultural area about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

Some 110,000 people living around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant were evacuated after the massive March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami knocked out the plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water.

Experts calculated that people in the most affected regions had an additional 4 to 7 percent overall risk of developing cancers, including leukemia and breast cancer. In Japan, men have about a 41 percent lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ, while a woman's lifetime risk is about 29 percent. For those most hit by the radiation after Fukushima, their chances of cancer would rise by about 1 percent.

"These are pretty small proportional increases," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," he said. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

WHO estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and the normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That lifetime risk would be 0.5 percent higher for those women who got the highest radiation doses as babies.

Wakeford said the increase in such cancers may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted and believe that the low-dose radiation people in Fukushima received hasn't been proven to raise the chances of cancer.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who was not connected to the WHO report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the WHO of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

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Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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Lens Blog: The Largely Unknown Photography of Lola Álvarez Bravo

The year 2007 was a pretty good one for rediscovering long-forgotten images in Mexico. Most people already know about Robert Capa’s Mexican suitcase, a trove of his work from the Spanish Civil War. But that same year an unknown archive of vintage prints by Mexico’s greatest photographers was also discovered, left behind in the longtime home of Lola Álvarez Bravo.

The find, known as the Gonzalez-Rendon archive, had prints and original photomontages by Lola, as well as some beautifully printed images by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to whom she had been married for several years. The find also included work by some of Lola’s students who had gone on to become noted photographers, Mariana Yampolsky and Raul Conde, among them.

Though overshadowed by her more famous partner, who had resisted her foray into photography, Lola ranks among Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, having done portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals as well as work among the indigenous and poor, whom she portrayed with a sense of compassion and social criticism. Her images provide a window in what she — a working photographer and teacher most of her life — valued as an artistic statement.

“It’s what an art historian dreams about, finding the missing pieces,” said James Oles, a lecturer at Wellesley College who was among the first to inspect the images in Mexico. “The material fleshes out some aspects of her work, giving us original titles and dates that radically change the meaning and interpretation of a work of art. And the original photomontages give an idea how she created them.”

Adriana Zavala, an associate professor of Latin American Art at Tufts University, was also among those who got an early look at the trove, which she now thinks consisted of things Lola forget she even had. Since then, she and Rachael Arauz, a specialist in modernist photography, have curated three exhibitions drawn from the archive, including a show that will begin in late March at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., which will combine the more recent finds with previously held vintage work.

“It was like the Antiques Roadshow when we found this stuff, went through it carefully and got an opportunity to understand Lola in an ‘unauthorized’ way,” Ms. Zavala said. “This allows us to talk about the encounter between the two different bodies of material.”

Born Dolores Concepcion Martinez in 1903, she grew up in a wealthy family, although she had to move in with relatives when her father died. She first met Manuel in her youth, marrying him in 1925. As an accountant, he was sent to work in Oaxaca, where the couple began to take pictures, Mr. Oles wrote in the recently-published catalog, “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era,” which he edited and which also includes essays by Ms. Arauz and Ms. Zavala.

The area’s poverty struck her, and it elicited a compassion in her work that was different from her husband’s more complex images.

“Lola was maybe a little more natural,” Mr. Oles said. “She was interested in more candid and less intrusive images. She was certainly more interested in people than things.”

The couple separated in 1934, divorcing in 1949. Throughout, she kept his name and did not remarry. She supported herself as a photographer working for government agencies, as well as teaching, where she influenced many.

“I think Lola was a remarkable photographer, especially given all the challenges she faced,” said Elizabeth Ferrer, who published “Lola Álvarez Bravo” with Aperture. “There were women artists, though women were not supposed to be working in the street but in the studio. But the kind of photography done at the time involved a greater public interface, and the fact that she did that showed her incredible strength and desire to photograph the world around her.”

Although she found her own path apart from her more famous husband — she was more gregarious, enjoying the company of artists, writers and intellectuals — work and circumstance worked against her. It was not until the 1980s, Mr. Oles said, that her work as an artist came to the fore.

Mr. Oles visited her in the early 1990s, around the time when the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired an archive of her work. Lola was moved by her son to another apartment, and she died in 1993.

Fourteen years later, Mr. Oles got a call from a museum in Mexico City. Relatives of one of Lola’s friends, who had bought her old apartment, had been safeguarding several boxes that had been left behind. One of them had taken the time to preserve and order the prints.

“She didn’t sell anything or have it framed in her apartment, but just organized it,” Mr. Oles said. “When I went there, it was amazing. It showed what had been separated at some time by Lola, and God knows when or why, there were a lot of her own photos. Many were by students of hers as well as a group of extraordinary vintage photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.”

Her photos — including some vintage prints that were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1943 — shed new light on her work. In some cases, original titles gave new meaning to old images. One shot of an indigenous woman seated against a wrought-iron fence that had long been titled “By the Fault of Others” turned out to have “Death Penalty” (Slide 6) as its original title.

“That changes how we interpret this photo of this woman who looks trapped by this grille,” Mr. Oles said. “You can go into the archive of any major photographer and find images they never printed and exhibit them after their death without knowing what they mean. Finding this material tells us these are the photos she chose which she thought were the key images that she was interested in during that era.”

While her photomontages are well known, the archive has the originals, which she made by gluing together cut-out images she would later photograph for the final montage.

“In Mexico, photomontage was mainly a strategy of media and advertising, not an artistic project,” Mr. Oles said. “What Lola was trying to do was elevate it to the realm of high art and view it as equivalent to muralism. The multiple perspectives of photomontage and the fragmented images resolved into a whole are what a muralist like Diego Rivera does when he shows multiple perspectives of a factory and resolving them together. Lola understood that.”

Among the greatest finds in the archive are works by her students. Even in death, though, Lola’s own images prove to affect a current generation. Mr. Oles said her photos of prostitutes, titled “Triptych of the Martyrs,” has a powerful element of feminist criticism.

“Their faces are obscured with wound-like shadows,” he said. “There is this undercurrent of social critique. Whenever my students see those pictures, they are moved sometimes to the point of tears. I don’t think any of Manuel Álvarez Bravos’s photos move them to tears.”

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The exhibit “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era” will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson from March 30 through June 23.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2013

An earlier version of this post incorrectly implied that James Oles was the author of "Lola Alvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era." He edited the catalog, though he also contributed an essay.

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Dancing with the Stars: Kellie Pickler Calls Partner Derek Hough an 'Answered Prayer'

TV Watch

By Monica Rizzo

02/27/2013 at 10:35 AM EST

Kellie Pickler and Derek Hough

Getty(2)

When country singer Kellie Pickler found out Derek Hough would be her Dancing with the Stars pro partner, the first person she wanted to thank was her grandfather, Ken Morton.

"Having Derek as my partner is an answered prayer," Pickler tells PEOPLE. "Right before I left Nashville for L.A., my Grandpa Ken, who is a huge fan of the show, told me he was praying that Derek would be my partner, because that's his favorite male dancer on the show."

Picker, 26, made a splash on season 5 of American Idol, which films at a soundstage next door to Dancing with the Stars. Now she hopes that returning to the building where her career got its start and teaming with three-time DWTS champ Hough, whom she calls "a phenomenal dancer," will bring her luck in the pursuit of the coveted mirror-ball trophy.

And for good measure, she's counting on her Grandpa Ken.

"Now I think I will tell him to pray that we win!" Pickler says.

Dancing's new season kicks off March 18 on ABC.

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Vt. lye victim gets new face at Boston hospital

BOSTON (AP) — A Vermont woman whose face was disfigured in a lye attack has received a face transplant.

Doctors at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital say 44-year-old Carmen Blandin Tarleton underwent the surgery earlier this month.

A team worked 15 hours to transplant the facial skin, including the neck, nose, lips, facial muscles, arteries and nerves.

The 44-year-old Tarleton, of Thetford, Vt., was attacked by her former husband in 2007. He doused her with industrial strength lye. She suffered chemical burns over 80 percent of her body. The mother of two wrote a book about her experience that describes her recovery.

It was the fifth face transplant at the Boston hospital.

Physicians are planning to discuss the case Wednesday at the hospital.

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Wall Street inches up after data

MADRID, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Lionel Messi has rarely been accused of failing to deliver in big games, having scored in two European Cup finals, but after subdued performances against AC Milan and Real Madrid, questions are being asked. The four-times World Player of the Year and leading scorer in one of the greatest club teams of all time, was a shadow of his usual self at the San Siro in a Champions League last-16 first leg last week, when Barcelona slumped to a 2-0 defeat. ...

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Benedict XVI to Keep His Name and Become Pope Emeritus

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI will keep the name Benedict XVI and become the Roman pontiff emeritus or pope emeritus, the Vatican announced Tuesday, putting an end to days of speculation on how the pope will be addressed once he ceases to be the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics on Thursday.

Benedict, the first pope to resign voluntarily in six centuries, will dress in a simple white cassock, forgoing the mozzetta, the elbow-length cape worn by some Catholic clergymen, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters at a news briefing.

And he will no longer wear the red shoes typically worn by popes, symbolizing the blood of the martyrs, Father Lombardi said, opting instead for a more quotidian brown. “Mexicans will be happy to know that the pope very much appreciated the shoes” he received as a gift last year in León, Mexico, he added. “He finds them very comfortable.” It was after the grueling trip in March 2012 that the pope began to seriously consider resigning, the Vatican said after the pope announced his resignation on Feb. 11.

Father Lombardi said the pope had decided on his couture in consultation with other Vatican officials. Benedict will also stop using the so-called fisherman’s ring to seal documents. It will be destroyed by the cardinal camerlengo, the acting head of state of Vatican City during the “sede vacante,” the canon law term used when the papacy is vacant.

As his staff finishes packing up his personal belongings, the pope will hold his scheduled weekly audience Wednesday — to which 50,000 tickets have already been requested — and then meet with several dignitaries, including the presidents of Slovakia and of the German region of Bavaria, who have traveled to Rome to bid their respects.

Thursday will be a day of goodbyes, to the cardinals already present in Rome, and later to some members of the Curia. In the afternoon, he will depart for Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of popes, where he will remain until restorations are complete on the convent inside the Vatican where he will live out his days.

Father Lombardi said the College of Cardinals would probably begin meeting next Monday to discuss various issues, like the problems facing the church and the qualities required of its next leader, and determine the date of the start of the conclave to choose Benedict’s successor.

Gaia Pianigiani reported from Vatican City, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

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