Re: Alleged Deadly toll of Chernobyl

["ruth_weiner" <ruth_weiner@email.msn.com>]

Ron, thank you for a really complete answer.  Have you published any of what
you say in citable form?  If so, could you post the citations, please?  Many
of us have to respond frequently to claims of, and questions about, death
and cancer from ionizing radiatin, and you post is one of the best I've
seen.

thanks

Ruth Weiner
ruth_weiner@msn.com.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron L. Kathren <rkathren@tricity.wsu.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Saturday, April 22, 2000 8:56 PM
Subject: Alleged Deadly toll of Chernobyl


>Mr. Cohen --
>
>You raised a very good question, and, in hopefully not too long winded
>scientific style, I'd like to take a crack at responding.  The thirty or so
>immediate deaths are indisputable, but the 15,000 claimed additional deaths
>are based on assumptions with regard to radiation doses incurred by that
>particular subpopulation and the risk of cancer induction per unit exposure
>to ionizing radiation, as well as the size of the subpopulation.  Different
>assumptions can produce vastly different estimates.
>
>Although many like to claim that we know more about the effects of ionizing
>radiation that any other insult, in actual fact the dose-response
>relationship is not well known at the low dose end (and I will define low
>dose here as < 100 mGy (10 rad) and, not surprising, differs for various
end
>points or specific cancers.  By multiplying an average dose estimated to
>have been incurred in a given population by the estimated risk per unit
dose
>and the size of the population, one gets a sort of theoretical number of
>deaths from cancer that will occur over a period of time, usually taken as
>50 or 70 years.  For any specific radiogenic cancer, one can obtain from
the
>peer reviewed literature a rather wide choice of risk coefficients.  Thus,
I
>can manipulate the size of the estimated numbers of [theoretical] deaths
>simply by appropriate selection of a risk coefficient from the scientific
>literature as well as by the size of the population chosen or by the
>estimated dose to that population.  Moreover, typically there is no
>adjustment of this estimate for other causes of death, or the age at which
>the exposure occurred Exposure of an elderly person theoretically increases
>that individual's risk of dying of cancer, but if the exposure occurred at,
>say, age 60, the real probability is likely zero as that person may die
from
>some other cause, likely heart disease or stroke, before the cancer has the
>opportunity to manifest itself.
>
>



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