Mutational signatures of ionizing radiation in second malignancies
This article is important, and should be seen by as many people as possible, as this scientific study will impact greatly the future of our anti-nuclear cause.
By establishing the genetic signatures of any cancer caused by ionizing radiation, any future denial from the nuclear lobby is now impossible. Those scientifically established signatures will also be extremely helpful in court for any future suit from radiation victims.
Abstract
Ionizing radiation is a potent carcinogen, inducing cancer through DNA damage. The signatures of mutations arising in human tissues following in vivo exposure to ionizing radiation have not been documented. Here, we searched for signatures of ionizing radiation in 12 radiation-associated second malignancies of different tumour types. Two signatures of somatic mutation characterize ionizing radiation exposure irrespective of tumour type. Compared with 319 radiation-naive tumours, radiation-associated tumours carry a median extra 201 deletions genome-wide, sized 1–100 base pairs often with microhomology at the junction. Unlike deletions of radiation-naive tumours, these show no variation in density across the genome or correlation with sequence context, replication timing or chromatin structure. Furthermore, we observe a significant increase in balanced inversions in radiation-associated tumours. Both small deletions and inversions generate driver mutations. Thus, ionizing radiation generates distinctive mutational signatures that explain its carcinogenic potential.
Introduction
Exposure to ionizing radiation increases the risk of subsequent cancer. This risk exhibits a strong dose–response relationship, and there appear to be no safe limits for radiation exposure1. This association was first noted by March who observed an increased incidence of leukaemia amongst radiologists2. A leading cause of radiation-induced cancers appears to be exposure to medical radiation, either in the form of radiotherapy for an unrelated malignancy3 or diagnostic radiography4, 5. These iatrogenic tumours arise as de novo neoplasms in a field of therapeutic radiation after a latency period that can span decades6, and are not recurrences of the original cancer7.
Many, but not all, environmental carcinogens induce cancer by increasing the rate of mutation in somatic cells. The physicochemical properties of a given carcinogen govern its interaction with DNA, leading to recurrent ‘signatures’ or patterns of mutations in the genome. These can be reconstructed either from experimental model systems8, 9 or from statistical analyses of cancer genomes in exposed patients10, 11, 12. Ionizing radiation directly damages DNA, and can generate lesions on single bases, single-stranded nicks in the DNA backbone, clustered lesions at several nearby sites and double-stranded DNA breaks13. In experimental systems exposed to radiation, including the murine germline and Arabidopsis thaliana cells, ionizing radiation can cause all classes of mutations, with possible enrichment of indels14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. Targeted gene screens in radiation-induced sarcoma have indicated an increased burden of deletions and substitutions with frequent inactivation of TP53 and RB1 (refs 23, 24, 25). In addition, a transcriptome profile that represents a state of chronic oxidative stress has been proposed to be specific to radiation-associated sarcoma26.
We studied the genomes of 12 radiation-associated second malignancies of four different tumour types: osteosarcoma; spindle cell sarcoma; angiosarcoma; breast cancer. These were secondary tumours that arose within a field of therapeutic ionizing radiation and were not thought to be recurrences of the original malignancy treated with radiation. We chose this experimental design for several reasons: the tumours are classic radiotherapy-induced cancers with high attributable risks for the radiation exposure; the radiation exposure occurs over a short time period relative to the evolution of the cancer; and the mutational signatures of sporadic breast cancers and sarcomas have been well documented10, 27, 28, 29. It should be noted that in the absence of biomarkers, a diagnosis of a tumour being radiation-induced cannot be definitively made (see Supplementary Note 1 for clinical details and further discussion).
We subjected these 12 tumours, along with normal tissues from the same patients, to whole-genome sequencing and obtained catalogues of somatic mutations. We compared our findings to 319 radiation-naive breast cancers and sarcomas processed by the same sequencing and bioinformatics pipeline: 251 breast tumours; 33 breast tumours with pathogenic BRCA1 or BRCA2 germline mutations; 35 osteosarcomas (see Methods for cohort details). In addition, we validated our findings in a published series of radiation-naïve and radiation-exposed prostate tumours from ten patients30.
The main aim of our analyses was to search for tumour-type independent, overarching signatures of ionizing radiation. Overall we identified two such signatures in radiation-associative second malignancies, an excess of balanced inversions and of small deletions.
To read more :
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160907/ncomms12605/full/ncomms12605.html
DNA damage, cancer caused by ionizing radiation identified
This UPI article was published on Sept. 13, 2016.
I added below the source of that UPI article, the study published on the sciences website “Nature” on Sept. 12, 2016.
This article is important, and should be seen by as many people as possible, as this scientific study will impact greatly the future of our anti-nuclear cause.
By establishing the genetic signatures of any cancer caused by ionizing radiation, any future denial from the nuclear lobby is now impossible. Those scientifically established signatures will also be extremely helpful in court for any future suit from radiation victims.
Researchers found mutational signatures left by radiation-caused changes to DNA, which may lead to better treatment of cancers.
Researchers found mutational signatures which appear to indicate changes to DNA caused by exposure to ionizing radiation, which may allow doctors to better treat cancer caused by non-spontaneous mutations.
LONDON, Sept. 13 (UPI) — Though scientists have suspected ionizing radiation can cause cancer, experiments conducted in England are the first to show the damage it inflicts on DNA and may allow doctors to identify tumors caused by radiation.
In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists showed the effects of gamma rays, X-rays and radioactive particles on DNA, deciphering patterns they think will help differentiate between spontaneous and radiation-caused tumors, allowing for better cancer treatment.
“To find out how radiation could cause cancer, we studied the genomes of cancers caused by radiation in comparison to tumors that arose spontaneously,” Dr. Peter Campbell, a researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said in a press release. “By comparing the DNA sequences we found two mutational signatures for radiation damage that were independent of cancer type. We then checked the findings with prostate cancers that had or had not been exposed to radiation, and found the same two signatures again. These mutational signatures help us explain how high-energy radiation damages DNA.”
For the study, the researchers looked for mutational signatures in 12 cancer patients with radiation-associated second malignancies, and compared their tumors to 319 from patients not exposed to radiation.
The researchers found two mutational signatures they link to radiation. While one causes small deletions of DNA bases, the other — called a balanced inversion — includes two cuts to DNA, with the middle piece spinning around and rejoining in the opposite direction.
These mutations, especially balanced inversions, which do not happen naturally in the body, increase the potential for cancer to develop, the researchers say.
“This is the first time that scientists have been able to define the damage caused to DNA by ionising radiation,” said Adrienne Flanagan, a professor at the University College London Cancer Institute. “These mutational signatures could be a diagnosis tool for both individual cases, and for groups of cancers, and could help us find out which cancers are caused by radiation. Once we have better understanding of this, we can study whether they should be treated the same or differently to other cancers.”
Mutational signatures of ionizing radiation in second malignancies
« Ionizing radiation is a potent carcinogen, inducing cancer through DNA damage. The signatures of mutations arising in human tissues following in vivo exposure to ionizing radiation have not been documented. Here, we searched for signatures of ionizing radiation in 12 radiation-associated second malignancies of different tumour types. Two signatures of somatic mutation characterize ionizing radiation exposure irrespective of tumour type. Compared with 319 radiation-naive tumours, radiation-associated tumours carry a median extra 201 deletions genome-wide, sized 1–100 base pairs often with microhomology at the junction. Unlike deletions of radiation-naive tumours, these show no variation in density across the genome or correlation with sequence context, replication timing or chromatin structure. Furthermore, we observe a significant increase in balanced inversions in radiation-associated tumours. Both small deletions and inversions generate driver mutations. Thus, ionizing radiation generates distinctive mutational signatures that explain its carcinogenic potential. »
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160907/ncomms12605/full/ncomms12605.html
A reminder that the World Health Organisation is subservient to International Atomic Energy Agency
Dissolving the WHO-IAEA agreement is a necessary first step to restoring the WHO’s independence to research the true health impacts of ionising radiation and publish its findings.
it is time the WHO regained the freedom to impart independent, objective advice on the health risks of radiation.
Toxic link: the WHO and the IAEA, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/may/28/who-nuclear-power-chernobyl Oliver Tickell, A 50-year-old agreement with the IAEA has effectively gagged the WHO from telling the truth about the health risks of radiation. F
Fifty years ago, on 28 May 1959, the World Health Organisation‘s assembly voted into force an obscure but important agreement with theInternational Atomic Energy Agency – the United Nations “Atoms for Peace” organisation, founded just two years before in 1957. The effect of this agreement has been to give the IAEA an effective veto on any actions by the WHO that relate in any way to nuclear power – and so prevent the WHO from playing its proper role in investigating and warning of the dangers of nuclear radiation on human health.
The WHO’s objective is to promote “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health”, while the IAEA’s mission is to “accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world”. Although best known for its work to restrict nuclear proliferation, the IAEA’s main role has been to promote the interests of the nuclear power industry worldwide, and it has used the agreement to suppress the growing body of scientific information on the real health risks of nuclear radiation.
Under the agreement, whenever either organisation wants to do anything in which the other may have an interest, it “shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement”. The two agencies must “keep each other fully informed concerning all projected activities and all programs of work which may be of interest to both parties”. And in the realm of statistics – a key area in the epidemiology of nuclear risk – the two undertake “to consult with each other on the most efficient use of information, resources, and technical personnel in the field of statistics and in regard to all statistical projects dealing with matters of common interest”.
The language appears to be evenhanded, but the effect has been one-sided. For example, investigations into the health impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 have been effectively taken over by IAEA and dissenting information has been suppressed. The health effects of the accident were the subject of two major conferences, in Geneva in 1995, and in Kiev in 2001. But the full proceedings of those conferences remain unpublished – despiteclaims to the contrary by a senior WHO spokesman reported in Le Monde Diplomatique.
Meanwhile, the 2005 report of the IAEA-dominated Chernobyl Forum, which estimates a total death toll from the accident of only several thousand, is widely regarded as a whitewash as it ignores a host of peer-reviewed epidemiological studies indicating far higher mortality and widespread genomic damage. Many of these studies were presented at the Geneva and Kiev conferences but they, and the ensuing learned discussions, have yet to see the light of day thanks to the non-publication of the proceedings.
The British radiation biologist Keith Baverstock is another casualty of the agreement, and of the mindset it has created in the WHO. He served as a radiation scientist and regional adviser at the WHO’s European Office from 1991 to 2003, when he was sacked after expressing concern to his senior managers that new epidemiological evidence from nuclear test veterans and from soldiers exposed to depleted uranium indicated that current risk models for nuclear radiation were understating the real hazards.
Now a professor at the University of Kuopio, Finland, Baverstock finally published his paper in the peer-reviewed journal Medicine, Conflict and Survival in April 2005. He concluded by calling for “reform from within the profession” and stressing “the political imperative for freely independent scientific institutions” – a clear reference to the non-independence of his former employer, the WHO, which had so long ignored his concerns.
Since the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in April 2007, a daily “Hippocratic vigil” has taken place at the WHO’s offices in Geneva, organised byIndependent WHO to persuade the WHO to abandon its the WHO-IAEA Agreement. The protest has continued through the WHO’s 62nd World Health Assembly, which ended yesterday, and will endure through the executive board meeting that begins today. The group has struggled to win support from WHO’s member states. But the scientific case against the agreement is building up, most recently when the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) called for its abandonment at its conference earlier this month in Lesvos, Greece.
At the conference, research was presented indicating that as many as a million children across Europe and Asia may have died in the womb as a result of radiation from Chernobyl, as well as hundreds of thousands of others exposed to radiation fallout, backing up earlier findings published by the ECRR in Chernobyl 20 Years On: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident. Delegates heard that the standard risk models for radiation risk published by the International Committee on Radiological Protection (ICRP), and accepted by WHO, underestimate the health impacts of low levels of internal radiation by between 100 and 1,000 times – consistent with the ECRR’s own 2003 model of radiological risk (The Health Effects of Ionising Radiation Exposure at Low Doses and Low Dose Rates for Radiation Protection Purposes: Regulators’ Edition). According to Chris Busby, the ECRR’s scientific secretary and visiting professor at the University of Ulster’s school of biomedical sciences:
“The subordination of the WHO to IAEA is a key part of the systematic falsification of nuclear risk which has been under way ever since Hiroshima, the agreement creates an unacceptable conflict of interest in which the UN organisation concerned with promoting our health has been made subservient to those whose main interest is the expansion of nuclear power. Dissolving the WHO-IAEA agreement is a necessary first step to restoring the WHO’s independence to research the true health impacts of ionising radiation and publish its findings.”
Some birthdays deserve celebration – but not this one. After five decades, it is time the WHO regained the freedom to impart independent, objective advice on the health risks of radiation.
Linear No Threshold Theory (LNT) of ionising radiation is backed by new research
Gamma radiation at a human relevant low dose rate is genotoxic in mice, Anne Graupner, Dag M. Eide, Christine Instanes, Jill M. Andersen, Dag A. Brede, Stephen D. Dertinger, Ole C. Lind, Anicke Brandt-Kjelsen, Hans Bjerke, Brit Salbu, Deborah Oughton, Gunnar Brunborg & Ann K. Olsen Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 32977 September 21016
Abstract
Even today, 70 years after Hiroshima and accidents like in Chernobyl and Fukushima, we still have limited knowledge about the health effects of low dose rate (LDR) radiation. Despite their human relevance after occupational and accidental exposure, only few animal studies on the genotoxic effects of chronic LDR radiation have been performed. Selenium (Se) is involved in oxidative stress defence, protecting DNA and other biomolecules from reactive oxygen species (ROS). It is hypothesised that Se deficiency, as it occurs in several parts of the world, may aggravate harmful effects of ROS-inducing stressors such as ionising radiation.
We performed a study in the newly established LDR-facility Figaro on the combined effects of Se deprivation and LDR γ exposure in DNA repair knockout mice (Ogg1−/−) and control animals (Ogg1+/−). Genotoxic effects were seen after continuous radiation (1.4 mGy/h) for 45 days. Chromosomal damage (micronucleus), phenotypic mutations (Pig-a gene mutation of RBCCD24−) and DNA lesions (single strand breaks/alkali labile sites) were significantly increased in blood cells of irradiated animals, covering three types of genotoxic activity.
This study demonstrates that chronic LDR γ radiation is genotoxic in an exposure scenario realistic for humans, supporting the hypothesis that even LDR γ radiation may induce cancer……..
In the present study we demonstrate that exposure to a human relevant LDR γ radiation induces genotoxic effects in mouse blood cells assessed with three separate but complementary assays. These effects were expressed as increased levels of chromosomal damage (micronuclei), phenotypic mutations (RBCCD24−) and DNA lesions (ssb/als). The absolute measured changes were small, but significant. The formation of MN was observed in all irradiated groups independent of genotype or diet, and significant changes were seen in both immature and mature erythrocytes. This is an expected result given the chronic exposure and lack of splenic filtration of circulating MN-containing erythrocytes18……..In summary, exposure to chronic LDR of ionising radiation is indeed genotoxic with potential implications for cancer development, and the response is modified by the availability of Se, an element involved in the antioxidative defence report http://www.nature.com/articles/srep32977
American Fukushima rescue ships still contaminated with radiation
16 US ships that aided in Operation Tomodachi still contaminated with radiation, By MATTHEW M. BURKE | STARS AND STRIPES March 13, 2016 CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — Sixteen U.S. ships that participated in relief efforts after Japan’s nuclear disaster five years ago remain contaminated with low levels of radiation from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, top Navy officials told Stars and Stripes.
In all, 25 ships took part in Operation Tomadachi, the name given for the U.S. humanitarian aid operations after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011. The tsunami, whose waves reached runup heights of 130 feet, crippled the Fukushima plant, causing a nuclear meltdown.
In the years since the crisis, the ships have undergone cleanup efforts, the Navy said, and 13 Navy and three Military Sealift Command vessels still have some signs of contamination, mostly to ventilation systems, main engines and generators……
The Navy has acknowledged that the Reagan passed through a plume of radiation. Navy images showed sailors with their faces covered, scrubbing the deck of the Reagan with soap and water as a precautionary measure afterward. The Reagan and sailors stayed off the coast of Japan for several weeks to aid their Japanese allies.
The multibillion-dollar ship, projected to last at least 50 years after its launch in 2001, then was taken offline for more than a year for “deep maintenance and modernization” at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Wash., according to Navy officials…….
Sailors who performed the work said it entailed entering spaces deep within the ship, testing for high levels of radiation, and if it was found, sanding, priming and painting the areas. They say there were given little to no protective gear, a claim that the Navy denies……
Eight Reagan sailors, claiming a host of medical conditions they say are related to radiation exposure, filed suit in 2012 against the nuclear plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. The suit asserts that TEPCO lied, coaxing the Navy closer to the plant even though it knew the situation was dire. General Electric, EBASCO, Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi were later added as defendants for allegations of faulty parts for the reactors.
A spokesman for TEPCO declined to comment for this story because of the sailors’ lawsuit, which was slated to go forward pending appeals in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The illnesses listed in the lawsuit include genetic immune system diseases, headaches, difficulty concentrating, thyroid problems, bloody noses, rectal and gynecological bleeding, weakness in sides of the body accompanied by the shrinking of muscle mass, memory loss, leukemia, testicular cancer, problems with vision, high-pitch ringing in the ears and anxiety.
The list of sailors who have joined the lawsuit, which is making its way through the courts, has grown to 370…….
Shinzo Kimura — a professor at Dokkyo Medical University in Japan who has studied radiation exposure from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Chernobyl and, now, Fukushima — said it wasn’t too early for sailors to show symptoms of exposure-related conditions. Doctors have seen conditions in children living near the plant that surfaced earlier than would normally be expected.
Kimura, hired by the Nihonmatsu city government for his expertise in the field, was the first scientist on the ground taking readings in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. He said each person and the way their body is affected by radiation is different.
While unable to definitively say if the sailors were sickened by the radiation, Kimura reasoned that the levels aboard the Reagan were high enough to cause illnesses. Otherwise, he said, why go through the bother of repeated cleanings to lower radiation levels?
“It is impossible to speculate or calculate how much the doses were before the two decontamination works,” he said. “The U.S. military is very good at risk-management. Considering that, it is assumed that decontaminations were conducted twice because the levels were not favorable.”
sumida.chiyomi@stripes.com http://www.stripes.com/news/16-us-ships-that-aided-in-operation-tomodachi-still-contaminated-with-radiation-1.399094
Nuclear Hotseat #271: How Radiation in Oceans Contaminates Our Food Supply – Tim Deere-Jones
This Week’s Featured Interview:
- Tim Deere-Jones is an independent marine pollution consultant and a specialist in the behavior and fate of marine pollutants in ocean, coastal and estuarine environments. He explains how radiation in the ocean from Fukushima and the UK’s Sellafield nuclear facility have impacted food safety at tremendous distances, as far away as the US West Coast. A jaw-dropping eye-opening report. This is an Encore presentation originally presented on Nuclear Hotseat #225 from October 13, 2015.
Numnutz of the Week:
The only thing “super” about Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe-Baby showing up dressed as Super Mario at the Rio Olympics is his gall at continuing to lie about the nuclear contamination awaiting anyone who dares to attend the 2020 Tokyo Radioactive NOlympics. (And that ball he’s holding is pure projection, if not delusion…)
Listen Here:
Illness legacy of 456 nuclear weapons tests at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan
studies have detected among area residents heightened levels of leukemia and cancer of the breast, colon, esophagus, liver, lung and thyroid. They have also revealed higher levels of cardiovascular and blood diseases, chromosomal aberrations and congenital anomalies.
Kazakhstan: Living with Semipalatinsk’s Nuclear Fallout, EurasiaNet August 26, 2016 – by Joanna Lillis In the village of Znamenka in northeastern Kazakhstan, adults have vivid memories of nuclear explosions rocking 
the steppe.
Zhannur Zhumageldina, 25, was born in the village of Olzhabay, 200 kilometers from the polygon, the year after it closed and three years after it conducted its last explosion.
At 15 months old, she was diagnosed with microcephaly, a rare neurological condition in which the head is abnormally small, impeding brain development, and scoliosis, curvature of the spine. Both conditions were caused by radiation exposure. Her diagnosis came as a bolt from the blue to her mother, pregnant at the time with her second child, a son who was born healthy.
“I didn’t even know the polygon existed until Zhannur was 15 months old,” said Zhumageldina, a single mother who cares full-time for her severely disabled daughter, who cannot walk or talk. “I was in shock.”
Across the city, in a cramped apartment in another drab suburb, Berik Syzdykov whiles away his days listening to music videos and strumming on his dombra, a traditional stringed instrument. Syzdykov, 37, was born blind and with severe facial deformities in Znamenka, the village where adults remember mushroom clouds exploding on the horizon.
“Once, there was a big explosion,” said his 73-year-old mother Zina Syzdykova, leaning back and closing her eyes. “It was the winter of 1979 and I was pregnant. Two months later, Berik was born like this.”
“Polygon,” she said with a shrug. “We didn’t know anything about it… When Berik was born, I cried and cried, but how would I know what was wrong with him?”
………Over four decades, nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk affected 1.5 million Kazakhstanis in some form, Nazarbayev has asserted. Due to poor record-keeping and Soviet official secrecy, it is still not known precisely how many people received dangerous doses of radiation, Togzhan Kassenova of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program told EurasiaNet.org. Data cited in one Kazakh-Japanese study suggests a quarter of a million people may have received elevated doses.
Dr. Zhaxybay Zhumadilov, a scientist from Astana’s Nazarbayev University who has researched the impact of the tests with experts from Hiroshima University, says studies have detected among area residents heightened levels of leukemia and cancer of the breast, colon, esophagus, liver, lung and thyroid. They have also revealed higher levels of cardiovascular and blood diseases, chromosomal aberrations and congenital anomalies.
Determining exposure and drawing meaningful conclusions is complicated, because “for years, what happened at the Semipalatinsk test site, [and] its effects on human health and the environment, were treated as classified information,” Zhumadilov told EurasiaNet.org. There is no international analogy for such “repeated acute external and long-term internal chronic exposure.”………
The state provides free medical care for the test victims: Zhumageldina’s daughter has recently undergone treatment in Astana to alleviate her condition, for which there is no cure. Still, Zhumageldina strikes an upbeat note. “Zhannur means everything to me,” she said with a gentle smile, flicking through an album showing photos of her disabled daughter growing up. “Everyone said I should abandon her – the doctors, my husband, my mother-in-law. … I said no. I’m going to look after her.”
Syzdykov received financial support from the government and an Irish charity for multiple operations in Kazakhstan and Europe, but still this man robbed of his sight by the Semipalatinsk tests dreams of seeing what the world looks like.
“If I could see, it would be good,” he said. “If not, there’s no need for any more surgery.” http://www.eurasianet.org/node/80311
Study of sea life shows exposure to tritium +increase in temp may increase DNA mutation
Rising temperatures could accelerate radiation induced DNA effects in marine mussels
Increased sea temperatures could dramatically enhance and accelerate radiation-induced DNA effects in marine invertebrates, a new study suggests.
Led by Plymouth University, in conjunction with the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), the research for the first time explored the impact of rising temperatures coupled with the presence of tritium, an environmentally relevant radionuclide, on marine mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis).
Studies carried out under laboratory conditions demonstrated that at radiation dose rates considerably below the recommended international guidelines, induced DNA strand breaks appeared earlier at higher temperature compared to lower temperature. At 15ºC, DNA damage was only significantly elevated after seven days in contrast to 25°C where a similar response was observed after three days.
Scientists involved say this suggests an acceleration of radiation-induced DNA damage and potentially compromising defence mechanisms as indicated by changes in expression profiles of genes involved in heat-shock protection, cell cycle progression and repair of DNA breaks.
Temperature is an abiotic factor of particular concern for assessing the potential impacts of radionuclides, many of them having very long half-lives, on marine species, and with sea surface temperatures forecast to rise 0.5-3.5?C in the next 30-100 years, determining the interaction of radiological exposure has never been more important.
Awadhesh Jha, Professor of Genetic Toxicology & Ecotoxicology, led the study and said: “Ionising radiations are known to induce genetic damage, and radiation-induced genetic damage could be modified by many environmental factors, including temperature. Compared to other radionuclides, large amounts of tritium are discharged, mostly as water, in the marine environment by nuclear power plants (NPPs) and nuclear fuel reprocessing plants (NFRPs). In addition, cooling water from nuclear installations is one of the major sources of tritium in the aquatic environment. As thermal discharges from nuclear facilities is an important environmental issue, second only to the release of radionuclides which could extend for a long distance from the discharge point, such studies are important in determining the hazard and risk to the natural biota and therefore environmental sustainability.”
Brett Lyons, from the Environment and Animal Heath group based in Cefas’ Weymouth laboratory, co-supervised the study and said: “These results are important as they allow us to better understand the risks a warming ocean poses to marine life. We already know climate change is impacting things such as fish physiology, reproduction and migration, but this research is part of a growing body of evidence that is suggesting rises in sea water temperature may increase the risk posed by certain chemical and physical pollutants.”
For the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, the mussels were exposed to tritiated water (HTO) with differing temperatures of 15°C and 25°C, and DNA damage and gene expressions were determined along with accumulation of tritium in different tissues of the mussels over a period of seven days.
In their conclusion, the authors say: “This study is the first to investigate temperature effects on radiation-induced genotoxicity in an ecologically representative marine invertebrate. It represents an important step forward in radioecology in general, and our study suggests that mussels (or similar marine species) exposed to increased temperature and HTO may have a compromised ability to defend against genotoxic insult at the molecular level. This is particularly pertinent in the context of rising sea temperatures and thermal pollution. The study suggests there is still a pressing need to investigate the interactive effects of temperature and other abiotic factors in conjunction with radiation exposure on aquatic organisms.”
Journal Reference:
- Lorna J. Dallas, Tim P. Bean, Andrew Turner, Brett P. Lyons, Awadhesh N. Jha. Exposure to tritiated water at an elevated temperature: Genotoxic and transcriptomic effects in marine mussels (M. galloprovincialis). Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 2016; 164: 325 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvrad.2016.07.034
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160823103216.htm
Indigenous Americans still paying the health price of uranium mining, long after mines shut
Years after mining stops, uranium’s legacy lingers on Native land http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2016/tribal-series/crow-series/years-after-mining-stops-uraniums-legacy-lingers-on-native-land August 22, 2016 By Brian Bienkowski
Editor’s Note: This story is part of “Sacred Water,” EHN’s ongoing investigation into Native American struggles—and successes—to protect culturally significant water sources on and off the reservation.
CROW AGENCY, Mont.—The Crow are not alone in their struggle with uranium. The toxic metal is irrefutably intertwined with Native Americans, long a notorious national environmental injustice. Some 15,000 abandoned uranium mines with uranium contamination pocket 14 Western states. Of those, 75 percent are on federal and tribal lands, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Contamination is especially concentrated across the Colorado Plateau near the Four Corners region of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, leaving a lasting impact on tribes such as Navajos, Utes, Hopi and Zuni.
The area became saturated with the dangerous metal from the heavy mining fueled by Cold War-era anxieties in the 1940s and ’60s, and the lax cleanup of the 1980s.
Most of the mines were on federal land—managed by the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management. But tribes, namely the Navajo, were swept into the uranium-mining boom for both their labor and land and are still dealing with the mess it left.
More than 521 abandoned uranium mines pocket Navajo land alone. Some 90 percent of uranium milling in the United States took place on or just outside the boundaries of Native American reservations, according to a 2015 study. This left a legacy of dirty water, leftover toxic waste and health problems such as lung cancer and developmental delays for children in many Western tribes.
Such pollution becomes a force multiplier for Native Americans—on the Crow reservation it adds to economic, health and historical burdens, and further complicates the ability to cultivate and sustain their culture.
In the body, most—but not all—uranium is excreted. What remains settles mostly in the kidneys and bones. Excess uranium has been linked to increased cancer risk, liver damage, weakened bone growth, developmental and reproductive problems.
Even at low levels uranium may play a role in some cancers and fertility problems. Studies have shown it acts as an endocrine disruptor, mimicking the hormone estrogen. Hormones are crucial for proper development, and such altering can lead to some cancers and fertility and reproductive problems.
For the Navajo Nation, many men worked in mining or milling, unaware of the risks, and later dealt with various cancers and failing kidneys. In 2000 researchers reported that from 1969 to 1993 Navajo uranium miners had a lung-cancer rate about 29 times that of non-mining Navajos, according to the study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Most of the mining tunnels, pits and waste piles remain on the reservation today near Navajo families. Water, already scarce, remains tainted with uranium and other metals. In one report, researchers found elevated uranium levels in the urine of 27 percent of almost 600 Navajo tribal members tested. The U.S. population as a whole is closer to 5 percent.
The uranium-mining legacy also left contaminated groundwater on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Indians. In Washington state, two mines were shuttered in the 1980s, but more than 30 million tons of radioactive rock and ore remain at the site. Today it is a federal Superfund site. Researchers are now tracking cancer rates on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
“We see a high percentage of wells contaminated with trace elements like uranium in the double digits all over the U.S, but they are certainly more prevalent in Western, more arid areas.”
– Joe Ayotte, USGSThis toxic trail spreads throughout the West. Some uranium mining took place near the Crow Reservation, but naturally occurring levels can infiltrate drinking water wells too. And private wells don’t have the same safeguards of testing and treatment that public water does.
“We see a high percentage of wells contaminated with trace elements like uranium in the double digits all over the U.S, but they are certainly more prevalent in Western, more arid areas,” says Joe Ayotte, chief of groundwater quality studies section for the U.S. Geological Survey.
The USGS reported 20 percent of untreated water samples from public, private and monitoring wells nationwide contained concentrations of at least one trace element, such as uranium, arsenic and manganese. Manganese and uranium were found at levels at or above human health standards in 12 percent and 4 percent of wells nationwide, respectively, according to the study.
Like the rest of the country, Montana home wells have historically not been tested for elements such as uranium and manganese, so it’s unclear if Crow is an outlier or the norm for the state.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality does not have regulatory authority over private wells on tribal lands, says Lisa Peterson, an agency spokesperson, adding that they haven’t received any information about contamination on the Crow Reservation.
For questions or feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.
Climate Change Gravest Health Threat of 21st Century
Leading Doctor Calls Climate Change Gravest Health Threat of 21st Century http://commondreams.org/news/2016/08/23/leading-doctor-calls-climate-change-gravest-health-threat-21st-century?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork
‘When you cannot feed your children, you will do anything, even if it means going to war. This is the reality of climate change’
Climate change is the greatest threat to public health worldwide and doctors must step up to help mitigate it, according to a leading advocate speaking at the annual Canadian Medical Association (CMA) meeting in Vancouver on Monday.
Dr. James Orbinski, a former top official with the medical charity Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who is now an an associate professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, urged physicians to “step up and step out” in the fight against climate change as part of their duties to create “health-in-all” policies.
“We’re not separate from our biosphere, or our planet,” Orbinski told the audience of 600. “We can’t possibly live, survive, and thrive without our biosphere. It affects us and we affect it.”
“Climate change is very much of our own making…but as doctors, we have a vital responsibility to urge the development of a health-in-all-policies approach,” he said.
The summit is taking place following extreme weather events and other environmental catastrophes throughout Canada, from wildfires in Fort McMurray to a massive oil spill in Saskatchewan.
The Vancouver Sun reports on Orbinski’s comments:
Droughts, fires like the one in Fort McMurray in May, floods, food security and infectious diseases are all linked to climate change.
Mental health problems and respiratory ailments from air pollution as well as rising rates of infectious diseases like West Nile virus and Lyme disease are also some of the consequences of climate change.
He also noted that Canada’s yearly rate of warming is twice the global pace, which means the effects of climate change will increase as time goes on, absent a concerted effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
“The implications are utterly profound,” Orbinski said.
“People go to war over water, food and territory, and when you cannot feed your children, you will do anything, even if it means going to war. This is the reality of climate change.”
CMA president Dr. Cindy Forbes said the organization would attempt to create an action plan. “I appreciated greatly Dr. Orbinski’s call to action, and I agree as a nation and as a planet we cannot ignore climate change,” she said.
The health impacts of wildfires in America’s West
Mapping the health threat of wildfires under climate change in US West Tens of millions will experience longer, more intense ‘smoke waves’ YALE SCHOOL OF FORESTRY & ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, Eureka Alert, 15 Aug 16 A surge in major wildfire events in the U.S. West as a consequence of climate change will expose tens of millions of Americans to high levels of air pollution in the coming decades, according to a new Yale-led study conducted with collaborators from Harvard.The researchers estimated air pollution from past and projected future wildfires in 561 western counties, and found that by mid-century more than 82 million people will experience “smoke waves,” or consecutive days with high air pollution related to fires.
The regions likely to receive the highest exposure to wildfire smoke in the future include northern California, western Oregon, and the Great Plains.
Their results, published in the journal Climatic Change, point to the need for new or modified wildfire management and evacuation programs in the nation’s high-risk regions, said Jia Coco Liu, a recent Ph.D. graduate at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) and lead author of the study.
“Our study illustrates that smoke waves are likely to be longer, more intense, and more frequent under climate change,” Liu said. “This raises critical health, ecological, and economic concerns. Identifying communities that will be most affected in the future will inform development of fire management strategies and disaster preparedness programs.”…..http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/ysof-mt081516.php
Previously classified documents help legal case for thorium affected nuclear workers
Once secret documents helping lawyers argue for sick nuclear workers at South Carolina complex Unlike many lawyers, Bob Warren agreed to represent sick workers at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The pay has been low, but Warren has for 13 years handled their cases in hopes of gaining compensation from the federal government. He’s done so, despite battling Parkinson’s disease and financial difficulties.Today, he continues to press their cases from a tiny law office in Black Mountain, N.C. BY SAMMY FRETWELL sfretwell@thestate.com COLUMBIA, SC , 11 Aug 16,
Lawyers are using once-classified government documents to argue that potentially thousands of sick nuclear weapons workers and their families should be eligible for federal benefits.
The documents, released late last year, provide evidence that some workers at the Savannah River Site were exposed to thorium after 1972 even though the government said the South Carolina plant no longer had significant quantities of the radioactive material, said Bob Warren, an attorney representing ex-SRS employees.
Warren said the federal records show that SRS had ample amounts of thorium, a metal used in nuclear reactions that can cause cancer. Warren obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act from the U.S. Department of Energy after a three-year wait.
“Without this information, we would not be able to go forward,’’ Warren said in an interview with The State. “These documents are pivotal in making the case.’’
In a letter to a government radiation advisory board, Warren asks that more people employed at SRS be compensated for illnesses they contracted while working there.
Warren’s request, to be discussed by the advisory board Wednesday, seeks to expand a federal compensation program by making it easier for people who worked at SRS from 1973-2007 to gain benefits for cancer the site caused.
The federal government has already made it easier for many sick workers employed before 1973 at SRS to receive compensation because of likely exposure to thorium at the site.
Those eligible for benefits could get up to $400,000 each under the federal compensation program. The program, available to sick workers at federal weapons complexes across the country, has been criticized as a bureaucratic maze of rules so tough that many deserving people have been denied benefits. Some ex-workers have died before receiving compensation, according to a McClatchy newspapers investigation last year.
“There is no reason not to expand,’’ Warren’s written comments said, noting that approving his request would make “many more workers and their survivors eligible for benefits from the … program before they die.’’
Warren said if he is successful, several thousand people who worked at SRS from 1973 to 2007 could receive benefits.
SRS is a 310-square mile federal atomic weapons site near Aiken along the Georgia border. It was a cornerstone of the nation’s Cold War nuclear weapons production effort, at times employing more than 10,000 people. Many who worked there were exposed to radiation, and some now say the exposure made them sick.
Federal officials charged with recommending whether to expand the program are expected to challenge Warren’s arguments at Wednesday’s meeting of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. But Warren said it’s hard to dispute what he has found in more than 1,300 pages of records that the government released.
The documents, many of which were previously classified, contradict past federal justification for not expanding the compensation program, he said. The records indicate that thorium existed in notable quantities for years at SRS after 1972 – despite government arguments that it did not.
Among the documents are:
▪ Handwritten records from SRS officials showing that more than 8 tons of thorium were stored at the site in 1998.
▪ A 1982 memo from a ranking SRS official showing that thorium was among the radioactive materials the government wanted to discard.
▪ A 1976 inventory report showing about 7 tons of thorium on the site.
In addition, Warren’s comment letter to the advisory board uses the deposition of a top site official to show that the government had no bioassay medical screening program for thorium exposure before 2000.
Thorium is used in the aerospace industry and in nuclear reactions. Breathing thorium dust may cause an increased chance of lung disease as well as lung and pancreatic cancer years after being exposed, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Thorium, which is odorless and tasteless, also has been linked to bone cancer, the agency reports.
The 1,300 pages released by the government now “definitely show thorium shipments to, and in some cases from, SRS after 1972,’’ Warren’s letter says. In the past, federal health officials charged with giving the advisory board information have not provided documentation that would have helped the board recommend expanding the program to cover more recent years, he said.
The Department of Energy had no immediate comment on the thorium issue. It could be months before Warren’s request is resolved……….
Under the federal compensation program, employees sickened by numerous types of cancer at SRS and other federal weapons sites must show that the radiation they received was a significant cause of their illnesses. But the government also can declare entire classes of workers as eligible without requiring each worker to document his or her doses. The class designation can occur when individual dosage records are unavailable to workers.
Bioassy records are unavailable for individual workers to show exposure to thorium, Warren said. So Warren argues that all workers from 1973-2007 should be eligible for compensation. In 2011, he was successful in persuading the government to make workers prior to 1973 eligible for compensation because of thorium exposure.
Warren’s petition is part of a 14-year-effort to obtain compensation for people who say they were sickened by radiation at SRS. An attorney in Black Mountain, N.C., Warren is one of the few lawyers who took on SRS compensation cases, which do not pay attorneys well. He plans to retire soon because of health problems but he works with South Carolina lawyers Warren Johnson and Joshua Fester, who will continue the work.
Nationally, the government has paid more than $12 billion to sick ex-nuclear workers and their families, including those from SRS, McClatchy newspapers reported last year. The energy employees compensation program began in 2001. http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article94448307.html
The affection of the central nervous system by incorporated radionuclides Cs-137
It has been known for a long time, and without a doubt, that even low levels of radiation in our food or water can have disastrous effects, even at levels of say 30 or 40 Bq/kG of consumed food.
And here is the study itself.
http://chernobyl-today.org/images/stories/bandazhevsky_lelevich_1995.pdf
Astronauts 5 times more likely to die from heart disease due to cosmic radiation
Cosmic radiation: Apollo astronauts 5 times more likely to die from heart disease, says study Rt.com 29 Jul, 2016 The first study of Apollo astronauts – the only people to have traveled beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield – has found that those who ventured to the moon are five times more likely to die from heart disease.
The NASA and Florida State University study revealed its findings on Thursday. They state that so far three Apollo astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, have died from cardiovascular disease, apparently as a result of the extreme cosmic radiation they were exposed to during their missions. The researchers concentrated on a small group for the study: 42 astronauts who flew in space, seven of whom were Apollo veterans, the other 35 being non-flight astronauts.
The study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, found that Apollo astronauts are four to five times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease death than astronauts who either never entered space or only flew on low-altitude missions.
“These data suggest that human travel into deep space may be more hazardous to cardiovascular health than previously estimated,” it said. https://www.rt.com/usa/353865-apollo-study-heart-disease/#.V5smTINhh9Q.facebook
The Genetic Killer – Ionising Radiation
Christopher Busby exposes the fallacy behind the current accepted model of exposure hazard adopted by governments and the nuclear industry since the ‘50s and which he will be challenging in a major legal case in London in June on behalf of nuclear test veterans. This is one of the rare times that I publish someone else’s work to the IMVA.
March saw the publication, in the influential scientific journal Environmental Health and Toxicology, of a landmark analysis of the effects of internal radioactive contamination on the genetic integrity of life.
My German colleagues and I used published data from Chernobyl effects in Europe to dismiss the radiation risk model that is currently employed by governments to limit discharges and exposures.1 This is the model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), which bases its analysis on a different scenario to the fallout from Chernobyl: the survivors of the Hiroshima bomb.
It is claimed that there were no cases of found in those who were there. So the ICRP uses data from mice to give a risk of a doubling of heritable effects after an exposure dose of 1,000 milliSieverts (mSv). To put this in perspective, natural background radiation’s annual dose is about 2mSv so ICRP says you need to have 500 times this dose to risk having a child with a birth defect.
However, our paper shows this is wildly incorrect: that the tiniest doses from ingested or inhaled radioactive materials released by accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, produced by the 1960s atmospheric bomb tests, and emitted routinely under licence from nuclear sites like Sellafield and Hinkley Point, kill and deform babies at doses of less than 1mSv.
The Government and the nuclear industry defend the ICRP position by referring to natural background radiation. But, though it is true that life has been exposed to natural background radiation, including radon, throughout evolution, there has never been on Earth, prior to 1945, the new Uranium fission and activation products like Strontium-90, Caesium-137, Tritium, Carbon-14, Plutonium-239 and their nasty ‘daughters’ and relations. These substances and the entirely new, airborne, radioactive, pure particles of uranium and radium only appeared about 70 years ago. Already we can see the terrible damage they have caused to the human genome.
The fallout generation
The first evidence of harm was identified by the late Prof Ernest Sternglass.2 He pointed out that the period of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons had caused increases in infant mortality in the USA and the UK. Fig 1 shows a graph of this effect re-plotted by me from a later paper in by a Canadian paediatrician, Robin Whyte.3 The figure also displays the increases in Strontium-90 in milk and in the bones of children aged 0-1 over the fallout period, as measured in autopsies by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency.
The sensitivity of the unborn child to radiation had been demonstrated by Alice Stewart at Birmingham University in 1958, but the authorities could not believe that the 10mSv X-ray doses to mothers could cause the 40% increases in childhood cancer that Stewart demonstrated.4 Nuclear weapons development was in full swing, fallout in the rain everywhere was causing increased measured levels of Strontium-90 in milk and children’s bones and teeth (see Fig 1).
The Cold War needed thermonuclear bombs: so research into the health effects of radiation was rapidly taken from the doctors and given to the nuclear physicists. The Japanese Hiroshima genetic data was manipulated.5 In 1959 an agreement was signed between the medics at the World Health Organisation and the physicists at the International Atomic Energy Agency, leaving all studies of radiation and health to the IAEA; thus the cover-up was sealed. This is why there has been no proper study of the health outcome of Chernobyl.
Fig 1. This graph shows first-day neonatal mortality rate per 1,000 births in the USA from 1936 to 1987. The black diamonds line shows the expected background fall in mortality rate based on the period either side of the atmospheric nuclear tests’ fallout. The red line shows the build-up of Strontium-90 in milk in the UK and the blue line, the build-up of Strontium-90 in bones of children in the UK aged 0-1. Mortality data from Robin Whyte’s paper.3 Note: different scales for milk and bone; Strontium-90 in milk (red: Bq/gCa++ x 10) and bone (blue: pCi/gm Ca++, sunshine units) from UK Atomic Energy Authority. 1pCi = 0.037Bq.
Radiation has its effects by causing mutations in the DNA, the material in the cell that carries all the information. If this is germ cell DNA (sperms and eggs), depending on the amount of damage, you get sterility, miscarriage, stillbirth or congenital effects, which can show as malformations at birth, or more silent malformations (eg. heart defects) or cancer later on.
If it is chromosomal DNA in a cell in the body then it can lead to cancer. The lag time between initial DNA damage and cancer is about 20 years. In my 1995 book, Wings of Death, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, I discussed all this and compared cancer rate trends in Wales with those in England.6 Because of the high rainfall, the cancer rates in Wales, which had been slightly higher than England, suddenly and alarmingly increased about 20 years after the fallout. The correlation was persuasive. Even the effect of the 1959 partial test ban was reflected in the cancer rate trend. The effect was particularly obvious for breast cancer, one of the sites most sensitive to radiation exposures, and I made such a suggestion in a letter published in the BMJ in 1994.7
Of course, the contamination of the planet did not stop with the 1963 Kennedy/Krushchev test ban. Where the testing stopped, the nuclear power contamination began, with releases under licence to the air and the sea. This was followed by the accidents, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the most infamous of many others. The world has been increasingly bathed with radioactivity since 1945 in a femtosecond of evolutionary time and there seems no sign of governments stopping this unless it can be proved that the radiation risk model is wildly incorrect and is killing people. But we can, as you will see.
Everyone now knows that the age-standardised cancer rates have been increasing alarmingly. Everyone has been touched by this epidemic. What is the cause? In the ‘50s, one in nine people developed cancer. In the 1990s it was one in five. In the last few years it is one in three and according to the WHO (who are not allowed to assess radiation) in 2020 it will be one in two.
None of the big cancer charities nor the Government health departments address the chief cause. Why? Because the main cause is ionising radiation. It is not smoking, nor lifestyle, nor obesity nor even the many chemicals now polluting the environment. The UK’s cancer epidemic began on the west coast in Wales and the west of Scotland with the rain and the fallout, not in the east, where the agrochemicals and insecticides are in greater concentration. This is the first thing I checked. As the late Dr John Gofman, of the US Atomic Energy Commission, wrote: ‘The nuclear industry is waging a war on humanity’.
The highest cancer rates are in those born at the peak of the fallout, from 1959 and 1963, now aged 52-56. The incidence of most cancers increases exponentially with age, but the ages when it is diagnosed are falling fast because everyone born after 1959 has been drinking contaminated milk, water and food as a baby, and building up Strontium-90 in their bones.
Strontium-90 (and uranium) binds chemically to DNA, the target for genetic damage. The effects are most easily seen in breast cancer and the proof that the breast cancer epidemic is caused by radioactive contamination can be seen in the studies of breast cancer near nuclear sites. We have carried out epidemiological studies of three nuclear sites in the UK: Bradwell in Essex, Trawsfynydd in Wales and Hinkley Point in Somerset. All three papers were published in a peer-reviewed journal.8-11 Two used official government mortality data to show there was a 100% excess risk of dying of breast cancer if you lived near the contamination; the other used a questionnaire organised by a TV company making a documentary.
Our new genetic paper, the subject of this article, reviewed all the evidence available from populations exposed to Chernobyl fallout. Increased congenital effects, heart defects, organ defects, limb defects, neurological effects like spina bifida and hydrocephalus, cleft palate, Downs syndrome and those appalling images that have been seen in Iraq after the use of depleted uranium weapons. All were found to increase immediately after the Chernobyl contamination.
Effects were reported from Belarus and Ukraine, but also from Croatia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the UK, places where the doses from the fallout were less than 1mSv. We also reviewed effects found in radiographers, surgeons using radiation, uranium miners, uranium nuclear workers in France and the UK and, finally, the children of the nuclear test veterans. I draw attention to this latter group because of what I am involved with in the High Court in London in June.
The nuclear test veterans’ case
Since 2004 I have been working with the nuclear test veterans as an expert witness in their cases against the UK Ministry of Defence, in the High Court action (which was lost on appeal) but, most successfully, in the Pensions Appeals. This has been in and out of Tribunals all over the country. I was successful in five cases in reversing the decisions by the Secretary of State for Defence not to grant pensions in cases of cancer, lymphoma and leukemia in veterans of the atmospheric weapons tests in Australia and Christmas Island in the 1950s.
Then the veterans’ solicitors, Rosenblatts, suddenly and unexpectedly dropped the case, a new group of solicitors, Hogan Lovells, took over, and threw me out just before the case was heard in February, 2013. The veterans appealed successfully and the case was remitted for a new hearing, which will occur over three weeks in Court 25 of the Royal Courts of Justice starting on June 14th.
Meanwhile, a proportion of the vets have died (of cancer). In the appeal in 2014, the MoD brought a successful motion to have me dismissed as a witness because they argued that, as an activist, I could not be unbiased. At this point the veterans appointed me as their Representative, so I am still there and the position is more effective than being an expert witness because I can cross-examine the MoD’s experts, something I am looking forward to.
I have already argued successfully in two hearings before a new judge, Sir Nicholas Blake, that we want access to secret material held by the MoD that shows the amounts of radioactivity, particularly uranium, in the bomb fallout. Uranium was not measured at the time, or at least the MoD will not give us any data, but we now know, from the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq and the Balkans, and also a huge amount of new research, that uranium is thousands of times more dangerous than is modelled by ICRP.
One of the effects it has (in uranium miners, workers, battlefield victims and populations, and nuclear test veterans) is that it causes huge amounts of genetic damage, shown as chromosome damage and congenital malformations. And, like Strontium-90, uranium binds to DNA.
The new judge has figured out that this is an issue. He ordered the release of some secret data showing the levels of congenital malformations in children and grandchildren of the veterans. Among his reasons for doing this, he wrote:
Dr Busby, who now represents the appellants Battersby and Smith, raises a number of new points not previously determined. . . The international Radiation Protection Authority’s guidance on the safe maxima in insufficient to screen out all risks to human health arising from explosions of the kind undertaken at Maralinga and Christmas Island.
Biggest public health scandal ever
We can use the secret birth defect data together with the new genetic paper to show that the radiation risk model of the ICRP is in error by about 1,000 times or more. This mistake, which was made in 1952 and has been promulgated ever since through the power and influence of the nuclear industry and the military, is, in the main, responsible for the deaths and agonies of all the people that you yourselves know have developed cancer – from the little, bald children, to the beautiful women suffering the cutting, burning and worse that is now orthodox treatment, to your parents, your own children and, indeed, yourselves.
This exposure is at the base of the loss of fertility and the increased real rates of heritable diseases (in advanced countries detected and aborted). Winning this case will put this issue firmly in front of the legislators. Accepting this combined chess move, the peer-reviewed study and the court case, should, in any unbiased court, result in the shutting down of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, including the nuclear submarines that deliver them. It is a Big Deal. But the prize is continued life on Earth.
About the author
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Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
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Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
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