Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought | Hacker News Reader

Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought

spiegel.de

116 points0x07c051 comments

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.

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.

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

Chest X-rays are a minuscule dose. They are in a similar realm to the dose you get from a long distance flight or 2 - especially if you eat bananas while you fly. Cardiac CT, chest/abdo/pelvis and PET scans are dose order of magnitude greater though.

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.

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.)

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.

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

Indeed, they're a very interesting exception to the general rule about healthy people not getting significant irradiation. Pilots in particular could be a useful group to study given that they have mandatory medical checks; however, I'm not sure that the sample would be large enough to yield any statistically significant results, even if the privacy issues could be circumvented.

(Also, you run into socioeconomic confounders: Can you find another population which has both the same irregular schedules and the wage scales of pilots?)

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.

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.

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."

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

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

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?)

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.

But why are those mistakes made? Radiation?

It certainly could be, but I think most mistakes are made because of how the process is 'designed'; sometimes an incorrect molecule jiggles (literaly) into a place where it is improbable that it should.

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.

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

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.

And then we get to the extreme paranoia where everything is generally recognized to cause cancer. And I'm not even convinced they're wrong, given the rates of cancer in people who (most likely) have never been exposed to anything (that they know of).

Although, then again, there's the problem of grandchildren of smokers getting cancer, when never having been exposed to the smoking first or second hand, only genetically through their parents.

Unless you are getting sunburns, this is not true. In fact, sunlight on skin promotes vitamin D production, which is known to help fight cancer.

The presence of a sunburn is orthogonal to the fact that you do, in fact, become exposed to radiation in sunlight. That is unequivocally true and trivially proven, whether you receive a sunburn or not.

I don't think the person you are replying to meant that sunlight exposure unconditionally causes cancer, and was simply addressing radiation scare and putting it in context.

All the downvotes notwithstanding, there is a direct correlation between the number of severe burns you've had and your chances of getting skin cancer[0], unless you have a genetic predisposition to skin cancer.

A moderate amount of sunlight on skin, without burning, is actually healthy for you, unless you 1) have various illnesses (lupus, for one), or 2) are genetically predisposed to skin cancer.

[0] http://www.webmd.com/melanoma-skin-cancer/news/20140530/5-or...

The say all we have to worry from the sun is skin cancer. That Solar flares don't cause other cancers. Remember this is the same science community and government that recommended margarine was safer than butter. That salt was dangerous and to be avoided which isn't believe to be be 100% accurate. They also created a food pyramid. We were told to eat lots of breads and pasta and fruit which contains sugars. People drank lots of juice. We were told to avoid foods with fat. Diabetes greatly increased ever since and now we are hearing it's the carbs and sugars that are more of a concern than fat.

We are told that mostly UV and electromagnetic radiation reach the earth and Sunlight is danger of skin cancer. Have we all read the peer reviewed studies and do we really know how often the sun potential sends a surge of Gamma radiation through your body? Isn't a great concern of long term solar system exploration about astronauts getting all sorts of cancer? How sure are we that the earth's atmosphere is protecting us from the same gamma radiation and that it isn't causing more than just skin cancer? Science evolves and surprises often occur. I personally am not so convinced that the Sun couldn't cause much more dangerous types of radiation myself but, I admit this isn't an area of research for me.

Relevant: http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/

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

I mean, you'd have to eat a ton of bananas for that potassium to affect your body more than the potassium you already have in your body does.

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

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...

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."

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.

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.

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.

A previous discussion:

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

Wasn't this the origin story of Antagone?

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com