Parent's nuclear industry job not linked to child cancer

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Friday May 28 3:13 PM ET 

Parent's nuclear industry job not linked to child cancer

NEW YORK, May 28 (Reuters Health) -- There appears to be no 
increased risk for cancer among children born to nuclear industry 
workers, researchers report. The findings are published in the May 
29th issue of the British Medical Journal.  

Abnormally high rates of leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma 
have been observed among children living in the vicinity of two 
British nuclear plants. This has led some experts to speculate that 
the children of workers exposed to nuclear radiation might be at 
increased risk for cancer.  

To investigate this possibility, Dr. Eve Roman of the University of 
Leeds, UK, and colleagues tracked 25-year rates of cancer in 
close to 50,000 children born to British nuclear workers.  

They found that ``the incidence of cancer and leukemia among 
children of nuclear industry employees is similar to that in the
general population.''

The number of actual cancer cases detected in the study remains 
too small to completely disprove links between worker 
preconception radiation exposure and later cancer in offspring, 
according to the authors. But they believe that only rarely are 
workers exposed to high doses of nuclear radiation around the time 
that they conceive a child, and even if such doses could cause 
leukemias in offspring, ``the number of leukemias involved would be 
small.''  

SOURCE: British Medical Journal 1999;318:1443-1450. 

------------------------
Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

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