[ RadSafe ] In-flight radiation benefit

[mister radiation]

Thanit,
 
If you want some good summary information I would suggest looking at the following link to the Health Physics Society's Ask the Expert website.
 
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights.html
 
In essence, the dose you would receive from 1500 hours of flight is much less than ICRP occupational exposure limits of 2000mrem.  1500 hours x 0.6 mrem/hour = 900 mrem, thus whether radiation at this level is beneficial or harmful (nobody can really agree on this now) your risk or benefit is no different than any other occupational radiation worker.  
 
Polar flights will have higher dose rates, but the doses will still be less than the occupational exposure limit.  

Provided that Howard Long is correct and these levels are beneficial then, woohoo, you are less likely to get cancer.  Assuming he is wrong then your risk of dying from cancer would increase from approximately 25% to about 25.08%, which is approximately 25%.
 
Hope this clears things up.  Take it for what it's worth.  You are fine flying for 1500 hours from a radiation safety point of view.
 
Ernest Patterson

howard long <hflong at pacbell.net> wrote:
Thanit,
BENEFIT of up to 10 rad/year (rem, cSv,- all the same),
about 100 x usual background, 10 CT scans, and much more than you get at 35,000 feet for 
1500 hours (unless sun spot storm) - can be found in thousands of references.

For example,
" Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?" Chen, Luan et al, can be found at www.AAPSonline.org under Departments, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Spring 2004 pp 6-10. 

10,000 persons exposed to av 40 cSv (rad) over 10 years (from Co60 in re-bar of apartments) had less than one-tenth the expected cancer and fetal deformities expected! 

Howard Long MD MPH

Fly High wrote:
Dear all doctors,

I have read your dicussions about in-flight radiation. I'm a pilot who trying to find the effect of cosmic radiation to us. Frankly I'm not quite understanding your discussions, there are many terms that not familiar to me. I'm very confused cause I think that in-flight radiation considered to be harmful. Any of you can kindly explain to me the real effects of radiation to our health? Is it really benefit or harmful? What is the criteria we should considers?

The background reason why I search for the radiation effects, is that our company try to push us to fly more. While the major airlines reduce flying time for their employee, ours try to increase. With the new route fly pass near polar and ultra-long flying time (16-18 hours per flight), the company can't find enough pilots to fly all the routes. So the management has asked our authority to increase the allowable fiscal year flying time up to 1400-1500 hours.
I'm not sure about the intensity of radiation near polar but suspect to be strong also the exposeure times is long too.

Could any of you kindly explain in simple language to me? Thanks for your attention and sorry to waste your precious time.

Sincerely,
Thanit Vittayaprechakul

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