Even low-level radioactivity is damaging, scientists conclude

Date: November 13, 2012 Source: University of South Carolina

The public policy video “Radioactive Berkeley: No Safe Dose” premiered at the Berkeley City Council in December of 1996. Featured speaker Dr. John Gofman M.D, Ph.D. addresses the medical impacts of low-level radiation exposure.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121113134224.htm

Summary: Even the very lowest levels of radiation are harmful to life, scientists have concluded, reporting the results of a wide-ranging analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 40 years. Variation in low-level, natural background radiation was found to have small, but highly statistically significant, negative effects on DNA as well as several measures of health.

Even the very lowest levels of radiation are harmful to life, scientists have concluded in the Cambridge Philosophical Society’s journal Biological Reviews. Reporting the results of a wide-ranging analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 40 years, researchers from the University of South Carolina and the University of Paris-Sud found that variation in low-level, natural background radiation was found to have small, but highly statistically significant, negative effects on DNA as well as several measures of health.

he review is a meta-analysis of studies of locations around the globe that have very high natural background radiation as a result of the minerals in the ground there, including Ramsar, Iran, Mombasa, Kenya, Lodeve, France, and Yangjiang, China. These, and a few other geographic locations with natural background radiation that greatly exceeds normal amounts, have long drawn scientists intent on understanding the effects of radiation on life. Individual studies by themselves, however, have often only shown small effects on small populations from which conclusive statistical conclusions were difficult to draw.

“When you’re looking at such small effect sizes, the size of the population you need to study is huge,” said co-author Timothy Mousseau, a biologist in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. “Pooling across multiple studies, in multiple areas, and in a rigorous statistical manner provides a tool to really get at these questions about low-level radiation.”

Mousseau and co-author Anders Møller of the University of Paris-Sud combed the scientific literature, examining more than 5,000 papers involving natural background radiation that were narrowed to 46 for quantitative comparison. The selected studies all examined both a control group and a more highly irradiated population and quantified the size of the radiation levels for each. Each paper also reported test statistics that allowed direct comparison between the studies.

The organisms studied included plants and animals, but had a large preponderance of human subjects. Each study examined one or more possible effects of radiation, such as DNA damage measured in the lab, prevalence of a disease such as Down’s Syndrome, or the sex ratio produced in offspring. For each effect, a statistical algorithm was used to generate a single value, the effect size, which could be compared across all the studies.

The scientists reported significant negative effects in a range of categories, including immunology, physiology, mutation and disease occurrence. The frequency of negative effects was beyond that of random chance.

“There’s been a sentiment in the community that because we don’t see obvious effects in some of these places, or that what we see tends to be small and localized, that maybe there aren’t any negative effects from low levels of radiation,” said Mousseau. “But when you do the meta-analysis, you do see significant negative effects.”

“It also provides evidence that there is no threshold below which there are no effects of radiation,” he added. “A theory that has been batted around a lot over the last couple of decades is the idea that is there a threshold of exposure below which there are no negative consequences. These data provide fairly strong evidence that there is no threshold — radiation effects are measurable as far down as you can go, given the statistical power you have at hand.”

Mousseau hopes their results, which are consistent with the “linear-no-threshold” model for radiation effects, will better inform the debate about exposure risks. “With the levels of contamination that we have seen as a result of nuclear power plants, especially in the past, and even as a result of Chernobyl and Fukushima and related accidents, there’s an attempt in the industry to downplay the doses that the populations are getting, because maybe it’s only one or two times beyond what is thought to be the natural background level,” he said. “But they’re assuming the natural background levels are fine.”

“And the truth is, if we see effects at these low levels, then we have to be thinking differently about how we develop regulations for exposures, and especially intentional exposures to populations, like the emissions from nuclear power plants, medical procedures, and even some x-ray machines at airports.”

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of South Carolina. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

Anders P. Møller, Timothy A. Mousseau. The effects of natural variation in background radioactivity on humans, animals and other organisms. Biological Reviews, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-185X.2012.00249.x

December 1, 2014 - Posted by arclight2011part2 | Uncategorized

5 Comments »

arclight, thought you might like this. Keith Baverstock calls Wade Allison “a quack” in this video: youtube.com watch?v=VoBLa2K7_6Y

Happy, healthy, peaceful holidays to you and Christina.

Comment by Kay | December 2, 2014 | Reply
- Oops, I’m sorry, I misheard…he called him a “crank” not quack.
  
  Comment by Kay | December 4, 2014 | Reply
  - This is the email that I sent to you – but it came back “undeliverable”
    Hi Kay
    Thanks so much for your input to nuclear-news
    So helpful.
    Running on nearly empty here at the moment. Cannot myself watch videos – no sound on my comp at the moment. Can’t afford to fix it just yet. Good old Arclight!
    
    I am tempted to put you on my weekly newsletter list. However it is mostly Australian, so it could well be just another pesky email that you don’t need. If you care to reply with “Yea” – or with “Nay” in the heading, I will know not to send you any more newsletters.
    
    Anyway, I’ll add it on here, just for this once.
    And thank you for the holiday greetings – may yours be lovely, too.
    Christina
    
    Comment by Christina MacPherson | December 4, 2014
- And also to you Kay .. Namaste ..
  
  Comment by arclight2011part2 | December 27, 2014 | Reply
The video of Dr. Gofman is excellent. Someone at ENENEWS transcribed some of what Dr. Gofman had to say, and his words are so important that I think it’s important to post it here, too, for safekeeping. (It’s a little long, sorry)

Dr. John Gofman:

“What’s the order of magnitude of the problem that’s been created by radiation in the 20th century? Today manmade activities added up in total exceed the dose from natural radiation.”

“Every increment that we add to that natural radiation will exact its price in human health, and human health with respect to some very miserable diseases such as the genetic disorders and heart disease and cancer.”

“50% of all cancers in the 20th century have been caused by ionizing radiation of the type we would call low-level.”

“Recently I wrote a book on the subject of breast cancer and stated that my best estimate backed up by considerable evidence is that about ¾ of all the breast cancers of the 20th century were induced by ionizing radiation of one sort or another, including medical. This is not a small problem and we there therefore need to give attention to every source of low-level radiation exposure to the public.”

“In the early days of the post-war period when radioactivity became available in large quantities as the result of the existence of nuclear reactors, many of the people working in the field said, ‘Well, what dose can we allow people to have which will be safe?’

“I wrestled with that question for over 20 years, and in 1986 on a talk about Chernobyl, I presented to the American Chemical Society, my initial calculations which said:

There cannot be a safe dose, because at the lowest possible dose, which is one radiation track through the cell, I have proved that cancer is the result.”

–> Regarding Tritium:

“Many people thinking about Tritium say ‘oh we don’t have to worry about tritium; the energy of the radiation is so low that we don’t even need to think about it.’ But that is a cardinal error! It is true that the energy of each beta particle emitted by tritium is very low, BUT there’s another problem. When you have a very low energy beta particle interact with biological tissue to produce the damage to genes, the damage to chromosomes, and the risk of future cancers, the lower the energy of the radiation, the WORSE it is in terms of biological hazards. Tritium is FIVE TIMES as hazardous as bomb radiation for the same total amount of energy delivered. And that’s a general law, a rule of physics. I don’t think any person who is reasonable at all can doubt that I have demonstrated THERE IS NO SAFE DOSE because I have shown with a multitude of studies that we get cancers down at the lowest doses. Now that’s been resisted… but the United Nations scientific community in 1993 has come out and joined me in exactly the same kind of analysis. Their conclusion: THERE IS NO SAFE DOSE.”

“Children are most sensitive with respect to the generation of cancer and leukemia from radiation. The study of breast cancer in Hiroshima with radiation from the bomb has shown that children under 20, women under 20, are the most sensitive; that from 20 to 40, they are less sensitive to the breast cancer generation, and beyond 40 even less sensitive. That’s not theory. That’s not speculation. That’s a fact. And the sensitivity of the young being greater means we should exercise every precaution that we protect our children from sources of radiation no matter how small.”

Comment by Kay | December 2, 2014 | Reply