{"id":2540,"date":"2019-12-09T10:26:38","date_gmt":"2019-12-09T10:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-medicine\/?p=2540"},"modified":"2020-01-06T10:21:01","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T10:21:01","slug":"radiation-and-human-health-separating-scientific-facts-from-urban-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/imperial-medicine\/2019\/12\/09\/radiation-and-human-health-separating-scientific-facts-from-urban-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"Radiation and human health \u2013 separating scientific facts from urban myths"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Professor
\nThis festive period Three Wise Women from the Faculty of Medicine will be giving us the gift of wisdom.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our first is Professor Gerry Thomas, a leading authority on the health impacts of radiation, who tells us why we should focus on the facts.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

I was born in the 1960s and grew up believing that the word \u2018radiation\u2019 meant something that was infinitely dangerous. Back then, we were led to believe that nuclear weapons would lead to the extinction of our species, and that to be bitten by a radioactive spider would confer supernatural powers! I was therefore sceptical about the use of nuclear power. It wasn\u2019t until 1992, when I started to study the health effects of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986, that I began to question whether my understanding of the health effects of radiation came more from science fiction than scientific fact.<\/p>\n

I have spent 21 years running the Chernobyl Tissue Bank<\/a> in order that my research group, based at Imperial for the last 12 years, and others around the world, could have access to ethically sourced, high quality human samples to understand the mechanisms that underpin the development of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with some facts<\/h2>\n

We are a successful species inhabiting a naturally radioactive world and must have evolved protective mechanisms to deal with the effects of natural radiation \u2013 or we wouldn\u2019t be here. All of us will be exposed to between 2 – 3mSv \u2013 millisievert is the unit for whole-body radiation dose \u2013 for each year of our life from our natural environment.<\/p>\n

Individuals seem to accept the use of higher levels of radiation when they can associate it with a direct beneficial effect \u2013 such as the use of radiation in medical diagnostics and therapies, particularly cancer treatment. However, there appears to be less acceptance of the risk associated with any radiation level when the possibility of exposure to often much lower doses results from emissions from the nuclear industry.<\/p>\n

\"Radiation
The abandoned Chernobyl power station and surrounding area<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So, where does our evidence come from?<\/h2>\n

Most of our understanding of the effect of radiation on health stems from epidemiological studies of history\u2019s worst radiation incidents. This includes studies of the survivors of the atomic bombs that landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s, to cohorts of workers who were exposed to radiation in the workplace, such as the radium dial painters in the early years of the 20th century \u2013 also known as the “Radium Girls\u201d, and, more recently, the nuclear power plant accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Each of these is a slightly different scenario, involving different types of radiation and different routes of exposure \u2013 factors which we now know influence health effects.<\/p>\n

Many things can affect our health; many agents in our environment can lead to the development of cancer. Compared with many other things, radiation is a pretty weak carcinogen, particularly at low doses. \u00a0To put this into some context, there have been 17,803 cancers in the Japanese survivors of the 1945 atomic bombing, of which only 941 are attributable to radiation exposure.<\/p>\n

The Chernobyl accident may well eventually result in a total of 16,000 excess thyroid cancer cases, of which only 1% would be predicted to be fatal.\u00a0 Although initial estimates predicted 4,000 excess cancer cases (other than thyroid cancer) in the cohorts that were involved in cleaning up the accident at Chernobyl, the data so far suggests that there have not been any that are attributable to the radiation.<\/p>\n