Officials attribute the infant mortality spike to “poor parent training.”

In the CBC story on the announcement, no mention was made of Fukushima.

Secondly, the variations seen week by week have many causes, and when the statistics is relatively low the random variations can be quite large on a relative scale. If you have 3 dead infants one week and 4 the next week, will you then start looking for causes due to this "dramatic 33% increase"? This is part of the game that Sherman and Mangano is playing with us.

If you want to find out about a specific cause above the "natural" rate (every infant death is a tragedy, but a large fraction of them are cases where the child might have been stillborn 50 years ago) you need much better statistics, and over a long time. Then you need to carefully try to rule out possible confounders, another difficult task where it is very easy to make mistakes. Then still you can have what seems to be a perfect correlation, but it may be due to something completely different. An absurd example: there is a famous study where the number of sighted storks over Germany correlated almost perfectly with the number of children born in Germany.

The anti-vaccination movement starts to show effects in a number of European countries at the moment. I am not sure if it has affected infant mortality rates (and again, you need to make a much more careful study than what the charlatans Sherman and Mangano did), but it is quite clear when diseases that were practically eradicated ten years ago starts to show up again among children.

Infant deaths to date in 2010 was 670, and this year? 674.

The article and math is bogus.

This math smells of confirmation bias.

Since the beginning of the Fukushima catastrophe, radiation levels in the western half of north America have many times been measured at three-fold and higher than the usual expected "background" radiation levels (according to sources in a number of different states, ranging from the far north to the far south of the western half of the USA).

If the usual "background" radiation dose rate is 2.5 mSv per year then this means that a radiation dose rate of at least 7.5 mSv per year is regularly being recorded. This is extremely significant, as it proves that radioactive fallout from Fukushima is in fact causing significant elevation of measurable radiation levels even 1000s of miles away from the three reactors in meltdown.

A tripling of the yearly background radiation dose inherently results in a tripling of the radiation-caused cancers and deaths in a population, based on the "collective dose" methodology (for calculating the effects of low radiation doses in a large population) originally developed by the IAEA themselves.

So, let us perform a simple calculation about the real effect of tripling the annual radiation exposure specifically in the places mentioned by this article, all of which have had real-time hourly radiation measurements since Fukushima that have been at least three-fold the usual "background" levels:

* The population of the area under consideration (Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and northern California) is approximately 26.6 million people (according to the latest US government statistics).

* A three-fold increase in measured radiation levels (7.5 mSv per year) means an increase by 5.0 mSv per year over the usual "background radiation" levels.

* An increase of 5.0 mSv per year radiation "dose" in a population of 26.6 million gives a "collective dose" increase of 133,000 Sieverts per year.

* 6 Sieverts (or 6,000 mSv) is generally accepted to be a lethal dose in 100% of cases.

* 133,000 / 6 = 22,167 extra lethal "doses" of radiation per year (in the 26.6 million population).

And you need at least 50 000 mSv in seconds to trigger instant death. 30 mSv over 3 month dosen't count.

<<Even so, according to radioecologist F. Ward Whicker, the concentrations of iodine and cesium levels "would have to be orders of magnitude larger than the numbers I've seen to date to cause the kind of radiation doses to marine life that would cause mortality or reductions in reproductive potential.

"I am very doubtful that direct effects of radioactivity from the damaged reactors on marine life over a large area off the coast of Japan will be observed," Whicker, professor emeritus at Colorado State University, said via email.
>>

Whoops, looks like cherry picking for the national geographic article you just cited.

Beside, because of natural selection, the bad fish won't survive but the others will.

We don't know what the impact of that radiation will be, but knowing we receive a lot more, it's certainly no apocalypse regarding radiation levels in US.