Taiwan steel mishap confirms radiation hormesis

This paper should be shaking the world.  It should have turned our radiation-exposure standards upside-down.  It should have established that regular low-dose radiation exposure is our best prophylactic against both cancer and birth defects.  Yet nothing of the sort has happened.

Well, what happened?  FTP:

Abstract — The conventional approach for radiation protection is based on the ICRP’s linear, no threshold (LNT) model of radiation carcinogenesis, which implies that ionizing radiation is always harmful, no matter how small the dose.  But a different approach can be derived from the observed health effects of the serendipitous contamination of 1700 apartments in Taiwan with cobalt-60 (T_½ = 5.3 y).  This experience indicates that chronic exposure of the whole body to low-dose-rate radiation, even accumulated to a high annual dose, may be beneficial to human health.

Approximately 10,000 people occupied these buildings and received an average radiation dose of 0.4 Sv, unknowingly, during a 9-20 year period.  They did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the LNT theory would predict.  On the contrary, the incidence of cancer deaths in this population was greatly reduced – to about 3 per cent of the incidence of spontaneous cancer death in the general Taiwan public.  In addition, the incidence of congenital malformations was also reduced – to about 7 per cent of the incidence in the general public.

The paper contains this graph of cancer mortality:

This paper should be shaking the world.  It should have turned our radiation-exposure standards upside-down.  It should have established that regular low-dose radiation exposure is our best prophylactic against both cancer and birth defects.

Nothing of the sort has happened.  Nothing.

Why?

Are the people in charge of our "health" evil, or just stupid?

Edit:  Backup paper link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/

Edit 2:  Contrary paper:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18666807

I find the contrary paper suspicious.  It's held behind a paywall, so the basis for the conclusions will not be examined by very many people.  This is exactly what a scientific fraud would do.

Labels: public health, radiation hormesis, Taiwan

  ¶ 6/25/2019 09:39:00 AM