Thus up to half the dose giving symptoms, there was evidence for benefit 12 years ago. Cameron proposes that we enable deprived areas to supplement radiation, at least up to the mountain state background, like the nuclear shipyard workers with less cancer (doubling gulf coast background).
How about offering 10 x usual US background radiation, like those sections of Ramisar, Iran with best lymphocyte activation? Of course accidental overdose must be carefully avoided, as it is in spent fuel transit in England.
Howard Long
RuthWeiner@AOL.COM wrote:
At least for now I would go with the HPS statement that at less than 1 rem/year (I am not sure of this number) the cancer risk should be treated as a distribution whose lower end is zero (those are not the exact words -- I am paraphrasing from memory).What strikes me as ridiculous is multplying a population dose of, say, 15 mrem/year (the EPA air standard) by 0.0005 and saying that an individual exposed to this has one chance in 100,000 (it's actually 7.5E-6) of a "latent cancer fatality" from that exposure. Even worse, that in an urban population of a million persons with an average exposure of 15 mrem, there will be 7.5 "latent cancer fatalities" attributable to that exposure. It's the blind application of a linear extrapolation to zero that is simplistic and I think misleading.
The literature, including Health Physics, increasingly shows evidence of thresholds (and I am not talking about Bernie Cohen's papers). One recent article on the atom bomb survivors seemed to show a threshold for cancer of 20 Gy! I am not touting this -- I think we need to keep studying this and come up with the same kind of completely credible threshold that EPA has set for, for example, the common air pollutants.
Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.
ruthweiner@aol.com