AW: [ RadSafe ] dose RATE is the decisive variable

[Muckerheide, Jim (CDA)]

Hi Otto,

I would also appreciate any of your papers that you have available in electronic form.

Note, e.g., the human data for dose rates in Gy/d in your '96 paper:
http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/Figures/1-2/4/1/Raabe_96_F30-7.GIF 

Also, below, your ref to HPJ 1983, Vol 44, is "Vol 44, Supplement 1" :-)


(All, This ref is a 590-page proceedings of the Oct 1981 Int'l Conf in Lake Geneva WI, on "Radiobiology of Radium and the Actinides in Man."  

This was the beginning-of-the-end of the Argonne Center for Human Rdiobiology (CHR) program to monitor health effects of people with radium ingestion, primarily the radium dial painters. This progrram was started when Robley Evans retired from MIT in 1970.  It was led by by Bob Rowland.  

The CHR program collected the data from the various US studies into one program; and it was chartered to identify and include additional cases who had ingested radium or worked in the radium industries, or ingested radium for medical or health purposes.  

The program was intended to be for the lifetime of the radium-exposed population, as with the a-bomb survivors, but it was a population that had long-term, and much greater, doses than the a-bomb survivors.  This group was much more relevant to assessing chronic and fractionated low-dose-rate exposures for regulations for exposure of workers, medically-exposed patients and others.  (As stated by an RERF research scientist at the 1997 IAEA Seville Conference, the dose response of the a-bomb survivors only applies to people potentially exposed to nuclear weapons, direct, essentially instantaneous, mixed very high energy neutron and gamma radiation.)

However, the CHR program was terminated, starting in 1983 by stopping the recruitment of new cases, and later ('86?) stopping the medical followup of people in the program.  The results were already indicating that the radium-exposed population would have better health and longevity than unexposed people to become statistically significant if DOE allowed the number of cases to continue to increase, and body-burdens established - there were a little less than 2,000 measured out of about 4,000 that the CHR group had aggressively and successfully recruited.  (Note: Evans' MIT program had had about 600 cases in 1970, with smaller numbers in the NJ and IL cohorts as the more substantial centers before CHR had gotten serious about finding radium-burdened cases, including exhumations - though such cases were not epidemiologically valid.)

In the '90s DOE "turned over" responsibility for the research to NIOSH, which 'decided' that this was 'very low priority research,' because 'workers would never again be exposed to such radium doses.' :-)

Regards, Jim

-----Original Message-----
From:	radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl on behalf of Otto Raabe
Sent:	Sat 9/2/2006 11:34 AM
To:	Rainer.Facius at dlr.de; radsafe at radlab.nl
Cc:	
Subject:	Re: AW: [ RadSafe ] dose RATE is the decisive variable

At 02:17 AM 9/2/2006, Rainer.Facius at dlr.de wrote:
>Dear Prof. Raabe:
>Though you apparently detected the ramifications of this fundamental 
>principle quite some time ago, this time the data pertain directly to 
>human cancer mortality (which of course I would expect to display the same 
>regularities).

Human cancer is from radium is directly evaluated in:

Raabe, O.G., S.A. Book and N.J. Parks (1980) Bone cancer from radium: 
Canine dose response explains data for mice and humans. Science 208: 61 64.

Raabe, O.G., S.A. Book and N.J. Parks. (1983) Lifetime bone cancer 
dose-response relationships in beagles and people from skeletal burdens of 
226Ra and 90Sr. Health Physics 44: 33 48

Raabe, O.G. (1989) Scaling of fatal cancer risks from laboratory animals to 
man. Health Physics 57 (suppl.1): 419-432.

Raabe, O.G., L.S. Rosenblatt and R.A Schlenker. (1990) Interspecies scaling 
of risk for radiation-induced bone cancer. International Journal of 
Radiation Biology 57: 1047-1061.


**********************************************
Prof. Otto G. Raabe, Ph.D., CHP
Center for Health & the Environment
University of California
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
E-Mail: ograabe at ucdavis.edu
Phone: (530) 752-7754   FAX: (530) 758-6140
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