Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought

Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought(spiegel.de)

116 points by 0x07c0 10 years ago | 51 comments

FiatLuxDave 10 years ago |

One thing I did not see mentioned in the article, and which seems to never make it into most articles about the risks (or hypothetical benefits) of radiation exposure, is the massive amount of information we have about the effects of radiation from radiation oncology. Six times as many people as were exposed at Hiroshima are irradiated on purpose in the USA alone every year. And the radiation is actually measured and planned. So Hiroshima is so far from our largest or best data set it is funny. I don't have numbers, but I'm willing to bet that more patients have had radiation treatment for non-cancerous diseases than exist in the Hiroshima cohort.

Epidemiology isn't one of my specialties, but radon and radiation measurement actually are. I'm skeptical about the radon baths, simply because that is NOT a low level of radon, in the sense of a statistically uncertain long-term hazard level. A typical radon bath is in the thousands of pCi/L, which is about a thousand times higher than the level at which mitigation would be required for health reasons for a dwelling. However, the amount of time spent there is low. So, it is like having a non-smoker smoke a thousand cigarettes all at once, instead of over the course of a year. Might that kick-start something in their body? Certainly, but it does not fall under the normal hormesis rubric. And alpha particle damage tends to be high and localized.

Paracelsus said the dose makes the poison, which is true. But in addition, time makes the dose. I have no problem drinking 100 liters of water over a few months, but that would be a fatal dose in an hour. More attention needs to be paid to the time component of radiation dosing and threshold effects.

nradov 10 years ago | |

Radiation oncology treatments usually focus a high dose on a single small area during a series of short time periods. So I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions from that about the likely effects of low-dose whole body exposure over longer periods.

Wile_E_Quixote 10 years ago | | |

Radiation therapy treatments are almost always fractionated, meaning the total dose prescribed by the radiation oncologist is spread fairly evenly across multiple days, typically 25-38 treatments for most disease sites. And since patients are rarely treated on the weekend, it usually takes 1 to 2 months for a patient to complete treatment. I don't know that I would consider 1 to 2 months a short time. There are some exceptions, such as gamma knife for brain cancer, in which the entire prescribed dose is delivered all in one session.

Also, radiation therapy is often used to treat not-so-small areas (volumes). For example, mesothelioma cases often require irradiation of the entire thoracic cavity. And if that isn't a big enough target for you, well, total body irradiation is actually a pretty common modality for certain, less localized, cancers originating in the blood and bone marrow. Both external beam irradiation (for mesothelioma) and total body irradiation treatments are always fractionated, generally delivering no more than 2 Gy to a patient in a single day, to give healthy tissue time to recover between fractions. Having said all that, you are right that this is still quite unlike the conditions presented in the article. Perhaps you would prefer studies analyzing the increased exposure of long-haul international airline flight crews.

cnvogel 10 years ago | | |

You cannot focus the radiation field perfectly. The whole body will be subjected to (non uniformly distributed) dose of maybe a permille of the reference dose in the irradiation center: there is both leakage from the treatment machine and scattered radiation from within the patients body.

Given that a typical treatment will be about 50Gy (distributed over many fractions), my estimate is for a few ten mGy (mSv) in total to almost every part of the body outside of the direct beam.

(I'm building dosimeters in my day job and work on medical accelerators all the time.)

Retric 10 years ago | | |

Chest x-rays for example dose lots of tissue. CT scans are significantly 100-1000x higher than that and well above whole body average annual radiation exposure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT_scan

cperciva 10 years ago | |

massive amount of information

I'm not so sure about that. As a general rule, we don't expose healthy people to large amounts of radiation; so it's hard to separate the effects of the radiation from the effects of whatever caused them to be irradiated.

sandworm101 10 years ago | | |

That depends. Flight crew (pilots and cabin crew) do receive significant radiation. They are a great set to study as they are generally much younger and healthier than the average medical imaging and/or oncology patient.

http://aircrewhealth.com/Topics/hazards/radiation.htm

Wile_E_Quixote 10 years ago | |

You're right, mostly. Considerably more data has been obtained from the fields of radiation oncology and medical physics about the effects of radiation on the body in the time since WWII. The main difference, I would argue, is that the article (as you also mention) is talking about alpha particle radiation. Most radiation oncology data comes from x-ray, gamma ray, and electron modalities. Heavy ions, including alpha particles, affect tissue rather differently. There is, however, a growing amount of data available from proton therapy and carbon therapy modalities.

cpncrunch 10 years ago |

This is a pretty terrible article on many levels:

- It says "Chernobyl hints", but there is no information about Chernobyl. The article itself says "We simply do not know" how many people died of cancer due to Chernobyl.

- The Radon spa study is very poor. We already know that going to any type of spa is going to improve your immune system, mainly due to the psychological effects. There was no control group in the experiment, so we have no idea if the radon had any effect.

- We already know that low-level radon exposure increases lung cancer risk.

bmh_ca 10 years ago |

See my answer here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/2490/1792

tl;dr: "There is empirical evidence that suggests that low to medium amounts of absorbed gamma radiation boosts immunity and resilience to ailments such as heart disease, though it may (or may not) increase rates of cancer. It has been suggested and that the reduction in the probability of death from other diseases offsets the increased probability of death from cancer."

amelius 10 years ago | |

This makes me wonder what effect absolutely zero radiation would have on an individual. And on a population (e.g. would evolution be harmed by having no radiation at all?)

dsfuoi 10 years ago | | |

I would say that ionizing radiation isn't the cause of most genetic mutations. It is just too rare and most of it doesn't penetrate the skin anyway, the rest has to be really lucky to hit the cell in the right place at the right time.

DNA copying not being perfect would be the main cause in my opinion.

There is one error on average for every billion pairs copied. The human DNA has 3 billion pairs. So every time a single(!) cell is copied, three mistakes are made.

You don't need any radiation for evolution.

api 10 years ago | |

What about other forms? Radiation is not radiation. There's gamma, X-ray, alpha, beta, neutron, microwave, infrared, etc. and they all have different biophysical effects.

0x07c0 10 years ago | |

Interesting link. Radiation hormesis seems to be a real thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

kinkdr 10 years ago | |

Ah.. So, good guys TSA are just trying to improve public health with their scanners! And everybody is raging against them..

morning_star 10 years ago | |

Risking cancer to diminish heart disease? lol no thanks. I'd rather eat vegetables and take a walk once in a while.

dsmithatx 10 years ago | | |

Don't walk in sunlight or you'll get exposed to low doses of radiation that "could" cause cancer. Also be cautious about where you buy those vegetables. There is a good chance they could contain things that also "could" cause cancer.

ams6110 10 years ago | | |

Banannas are radioactive. So are carrots and potatos, and some nuts and beans.

clumsysmurf 10 years ago |

This article from 10/2015 in AAAS is also interesting:

"Humans are worse than radiation for Chernobyl animals, study finds"

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/humans-are-worse-radi...

reasonattlm 10 years ago |

You might look up radiation hormesis. It is very well documented in animal studies. Damage causes cellular repair mechanisms to undertake more work, and if the damage is little and brief, then there is a net gain in quality control. Less dysfunction, longer healthspan, longer life.

It operates in humans because all other mechanisms of hormesis operate in humans. All very well documented.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477686/

"Three aspects of hormesis with low doses of ionizing radiation are presented: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is acceptance by France, Japan, and China of the thousands of studies showing stimulation and/or benefit, with no harm, from low dose irradiation. This includes thousands of people who live in good health with high background radiation. The bad is the nonacceptance of radiation hormesis by the U. S. and most other governments; their linear no threshold (LNT) concept promulgates fear of all radiation and produces laws which have no basis in mammalian physiology. The LNT concept leads to poor health, unreasonable medicine and oppressed industries. The ugly is decades of deception by medical and radiation committees which refuse to consider valid evidence of radiation hormesis in cancer, other diseases, and health. Specific examples are provided for the good, the bad, and the ugly in radiation hormesis."

gozur88 10 years ago |

We've known for a long time the LNT model doesn't reflect reality. It's still used because we don't have anything better, it's simple, and people like to put numbers on things even if the numbers are known to be wrong.

sdoering 10 years ago |

I was just asking how well researched an article like this is, if the get the name of the town wrong. It might be an autocorrect typo, but "Bad Steven" is, was and will be "Bad Steben" (some 20 or so miles from my hometown).

I know, that I just attack a small detail here and that this is not a valid way to argue against something, but I have difficulties trusting some journalist who gets these basics wrong.

lorenzhs 10 years ago | |

might have been autocorrect, I think newer versions of Mac OS have that as well (though it can be disabled, of course). Not sure about other systems.

jdmichal 10 years ago |

A previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11060101

mohawk 10 years ago |

Recent large-scale research suggests dose-risk relationship holds at small doses for leukemia:

http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-pin-down-risks-of-low...

louithethrid 10 years ago |

Missleading titel - Alternative suggestions:

DNA Repair facilitys more effective then previously assumed. DNA filled with more trash that wont be missed. DNA-DamageDice-Game proves no existing instinct for statistics

My grandfather (he is 91 now) was heavily into radon-research, i still remember measuring those watersamples and hearing the lab-equipment count the plibs when that gas fell apart in the sensoric chamber.

He presumed it to be healthy, but the number of times you roll the DNA-Destructive Dice is still limited, before you come up with a Full House (cancer).

So gamble nature if you must (for example because some asthma makes your lungs half-unuseable), but be aware of the statistics.

ommunist 10 years ago |

Thyroid cancer is strongly connected with Iodine-131 contamination, which is basically off in a week or so (decay half-life of about eight days). But if you were exposed, the risk is significant. That we learned from Chernobyl very well. But there is no hint about that in the article.

VonGuard 10 years ago |

Here's some living proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kg4vVYKc90

This lady is bitten by a radioactive ant, live on camera.... near Chernobyl.

jessaustin 10 years ago | |

Wasn't this the origin story of Antagone?

dsmithatx 10 years ago |

Humans evolved in sunlight receiving constant low doses of radiation. It seems logical to me that something in which is part of, the environment a species evolved to, would tend to have positive effects.

knodi123 10 years ago | |

> It seems logical to me that something in which is part of, the environment a species evolved to, would tend to have positive effects.

Not to me. Now, "tend not to have a negative effect on reproduction", sure.

But there's no reason evolution should make it beneficial, nor even neutral to those past breeding years.

For instance, if radiation caused humans to die younger than otherwise due to cancer, but still to live long enough to crank out a litter of babies and raise them to adulthood.... then evolution probably wouldn't care. Hell, evolution would love the way it gets rid of the chaff and frees up resources for the breeders.

Tossrock 10 years ago | | |

Well, the grandmother hypothesis actually suggests that among humans, living healthily into old age to help rear one's grandchildren has evolutionary benefits, even if one stops reproducing.

tpeo 10 years ago | |

Do large predators have a positive effect on human health?

I'm not trying to be funny with this, I'm just pointing out that human benefit isn't strictly increasing on all environmental factors, and that some of the evolutionary adaptation our species went through was about strictly avoiding sources of harm. Being present in the environment doesn't imply being somehow beneficial.

dsmithatx 10 years ago | | |

Not just humans evolved in low doses of radiation but, all land creatures have. Also not all life on earth was necessarily constantly exposed to large predators.

ori_b 10 years ago | |

Why? It may be harmful, but we've evolved to cope tolerably.

dsmithatx 10 years ago | | |

I should of said it wouldn't surprise me if it had positive effects. It would surprise if we hadn't evolved as you said to tolerate low doses. I can't think of anything else all land creatures evolved exposed to that is really harmful.

perilunar 10 years ago |

Again? googling site:ycombinator.com "radiation hormesis" gives 15 stories where this has been discussed.

smt88 10 years ago |

tl;dr No.

> Darmstadt biologist Fournier believes the question is misguided. "Something that strengthens the cells doesn't necessarily help a person," she says. "If it mutates, this cell can later be the source of cancer."

Gibbon1 10 years ago | |

I remember some Russians that worked at Chernobyl commenting that the radiation exposure had other negative health effects besides cancer.

Wile_E_Quixote 10 years ago |

Making the claim "Radioactivity is good for them." without any additional qualification seems irresponsible. One might similarly claim that eating fried chicken and bacon everyday is "good" for someone because it makes them feel happy. Of course, this ignores the fact that doing so dramatically increases their risk of heart disease. Overall, this article seems to be written for the layman, where all forms of radiation are created equal (untrue). The research that the article describes may very well show that sustained low exposure to alpha particle radiation reduces symptoms of arthritis. It should stop there though rather than make judgement as to whether or not it is good or bad.