Re: Children may get too much radiation in CT scan

[Bernard L Cohen <blc+@pitt.edu>]

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001 denison.8@osu.edu wrote:

> Note that the following two paragraphs of the article nicely contradict
> each other.
> 
> >And up to 500 children a year in the United States alone could die
> >from cancer because of it, a second team of researchers said.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> >"In the United States, of approximately 600,000 abdominal and
> >head CT examinations annually performed in children under the age
> >of 15 years, a rough estimate is that 500 of these individuals might
> >ultimately die from cancer attributable to the CT radiation."
> 
> Huge difference between the 500 deaths _per year_ stated in the first
> paragraph and 500 deaths over the collective lifetimes of all the kids who
> got CT's last year.


	--There is nothing contradictory here. If one year's treatment
will eventually cause 500 cancers, and such treatments are conducted every
year, there will eventually be 500 deaths per year. 

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