Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire

Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Scientists question basic conclusion of A-bomb survivors study

INPO - WANO News and Report



Posted: 16 Aug 2012 09:45 AM PDT

The latest Life Span Study (LSS-Report 14) of A-bomb survivors by Dr Kotaro Ozasa, Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), and others, published in Radiation Research Journal this year, noted that the risk of all causes of death among the survivors increased with radiation dose over the entire range of doses with no threshold observed. The RERF study supported the Linear No Threshold (LNT) concept which is basic to radiation protection.

This means that harmful effects of radiation increase with radiation dose and even small radiation doses can cause some finite harm. Some scientists challenge the validity of LNT concept.

Writing in Radiation Research (on-line July 20, 2012) Mohan Doss, Brian L. Egleston and Samuel Litwin, Fox Chase Cancer Centre, Philadelphia argued that the functional forms the RERF authors chose for dose dependence, were not flexible enough and might have led them to the conclusion of a zero-dose threshold.
They showed that there is too much variability in the data used by the RERF authors to suggest that the threshold for the harmful effect of radiation is zero.

RERF researchers observed that the radiation risk estimates for intermediate doses were lower than those for the linear model. Professor Doss argued that this observation is consistent with radiation hormesis or ‘beneficial’ effect of radiation (Dose-Response, 2012).

He noted that RERF’s formalism ignored the potential for a large systematic bias in the measured baseline cancer mortality rate. He showed that if we correct the bias, the excess relative risk for intermediate doses can lower to negative values.

Whether low dose of radiation will cause harm or not remains controversial. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and The French Academy of Sciences do not agree on the matter.http://inpowano.blogspot.com/2012/08/scientists-question-basic-conclusion-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Inpo-WanoNewsAndReport+%28INPO+-+WANO+News+and+Report%29


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