Zombie radiation: Fukushima's poisonous fallout eating entire chunks of peoples' brains away, reaching California coast

Jonathan Benson 

The Fukushima disaster has been out of the news cycle for more than a year now, but the radioactive fallout and its cascade of adverse effects is far from being just another page in the history books. Reports from around the world indicate that Fukushima radiation is still wreaking havoc on people's health, in some cases eating away human brains in some bizarre, zombie radiation apocalypse.
The Spanish newspaper, El Pais Semanal, reported back in May that Toru Anzai, 63, a former resident of Litate, Japan, a village in the Fukushima Prefecture, suffered a major heart attack and stroke several years after the reactor meltdowns. During Anzai's stay in the hospital, doctors realized that the frontal lobe of his brain had developed a hole, which they told him may have been caused by absorbing the radioactive isotope cesium, which was prevalent at Fukushima.

The hole in Anzai's brain caused the entire left side of his body to become paralyzed – this, despite the fact that following the reactor meltdowns Anzai was told that there was no risk of radiation. As it turns out, a dosimeter reading taken on April 18, just days after the Fukushima disaster, revealed that the room where Anzai and his brothers had been sleeping saw radiation levels up to 20 times higher than the threshold level established by the Japanese government for relocating residents.

Just weeks after the El Pais Semanal story was published, another one published in the Chinese paper Xinhua highlighted a slew of radioactive-related diseases triggered by Fukushima that have been ignored by government officials. These diseases include exceptionally poor health among children, including thyroid cancer, about which the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology had repeatedly warned the Japanese government.

The call was predicated upon a 2015 study, which found that children living around the Fukushima plant following the disaster were developing thyroid cancer at 50 times the rate of children living elsewhere. More than 160 teenagers living in the Fukushima Prefecture, in fact, had been documented as receiving a thyroid cancer diagnosis, to which the Japanese government paid little attention.

When governments lie, people die

The Japanese government's continued downplaying of the disaster has created an even bigger disaster in terms of public health. Much like the former Soviet Union did in the aftermath of Chernobyl, Japanese officials have tried to pretend that the Fukushima disaster is over and done with, and that all that radiation has somehow vanished – poof!

But nothing could be further from the truth, as we're still seeing in media reports some five years later. If government officials had just been honest with the public from the start, more of them could have prepared by stocking up on clean, storable foods, or protecting themselves with nascent iodine.

Instead, innocent people are continuing to fall mysteriously and gravely ill – in some cases dying gruesome deaths – because they don't even know there's a risk, let alone that they need to do something to mitigate that risk. Radiation is nothing to mess with, but because governments aren't being forthcoming about it, little is known about where it's spreading – and worse, little is being done to clean it up for the protection of the public.

"The improper handling of the Fukushima aftermath by the Japanese government has had grave consequences," Xinhua reported back in May, quoting a Russian nuclear specialist who's outraged about the way things have been handled. "After the disaster, lies and contradictive information emerged, making it impossible to decide the level of exposure."