RE: Geiger counter in every human revealed

["Doty, Patrick" <fpdoty@SANDIA.GOV>]

Hello Ben,



The radiation damage results in production of a certain fraction of new

blood cells with altered sequences. This fraction is correlated with dose,

and presumably remains constant for the life of the subject. 



Your last question was answered in a previous post: Zero means no detectable

dose (by this method).  If you read the cited paper you will find the

detection limit is about 0.1 Gy plutonium dose to bone marrow (see data

below).  If you plot this data and do a linear regression the R-squared is

about 0.57 (0.51 if you force the fit through the origin).



I don't believe this method will help answer "How much damage does cosmic

radiation do to frequent flyers?" or "Is depleted uranium from shells

causing cancers in former war zones such as Kosovo and Iraq?"  as is

asserted in the New Scientist story.



Dose	No.Cells 	No. intra-

(Gy)	examined	chromosomal defects

2.08 	135 		9

2.00 	125 		5

1.27 	115 		5

1.21 	135 		5

1.13 	141 		7

1.02 	110 		6

0.94 	147 		2

0.89 	145 		2

0.77 	126 		5

0.64 	157 		5

0.44 	152 		4

0.33 	111 		0

0.17 	127 		2

0.14 	110 		2

0.11 	110 		0



Regards,



Patrick  



F. P. Doty, Ph. D.

Sandia National Labs





-----Original Message-----

From: Morgan, Ben [mailto:ben.morgan@pgnmail.com]

Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 9:46 AM

To: RADSAFE (radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu)

Subject: RE: Geiger counter in every human revealed





Greetings:



Some questions come to my mind:



>From the summary: "The team used the technique to analyse chromosome 5 in

thousands of blood cells from 31 people who had worked at a secret nuclear

weapons facility near Ozyorsk in Russia. Though most of the workers were

last exposed to densely ionising radiation from plutonium over 10 years ago,

the team found a surprising amount of damage."



Questions: What blood cells are they examining? My copy of Casarett's

"Radiation Biology" says that blood cells have finite lives in the day to

months range. What blood cells would be present 10 y after exposure? Or do

these people have large plutonium burdens? If that's the case, why would the

damage be "surprising"? 



>From the summary: "Workers with moderate levels of exposure had a lower

level of damage, while those with no radiation exposure had none. Even

workers at a nuclear reactor exposed to high levels of sparsely ionising

gamma rays and mutating chemicals had very few intrachromosomal changes,

though they had significant interchromosomal damage."



Question: Where did they find people with no radiation exposure? Knowing

what we do about weapon's complex waste disposal practices, I would suspect

anybody near the place would have some exposure.





Regards,



Ben



ben.morgan@pgnmail.com

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