[ RadSafe ] Re:The Guardian on radiation risk. Oh dear, what a travesty

[Clayton J Bradt]

 Richard Bramhall's response to the Guardian piece (which I haven't read)
inadvertently makes a couple of good points: (1) The concepts of 'Dose',
"Equivalent Dose' and 'Effective Dose' are of dubious utility for
predicting health effects in individuals.  (2) We should not expect that
such macroscopic averages of energy transfer would capture sufficient
information about the quantum interactions of ionizing radiation with
organic molecules to enable us to make differential diagnoses from a
knowledge of dose.

	I would add to these a third: (3) We don't know enough about the
initiation and progression of cancers on all levels of analysis (molecular,
cellular, tissue and organism) to make any more progress on quantifying the
dose-risk relationship.

Clayton J. Bradt
Principal Radiophysicist
NYS Dept. of Health
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