Does anyone know how many annual hours Military pilots log and at what altitude? A regular flight from NYC to LA is similar to getting a chest x-ray: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/air_travel.html
Clearly if you are standing next to a high enough power transmitter, you will be cooked and die. At lower power you may survive but with severe burns. The effect of sub-acute doses is not clear, but it’s certainly not solid reasoning that just because your cell phone is not causing cancer that there isn’t a higher chronic dose that will. There is a space of power between “cell phone” and “admitted to hospital with burns”.
Military machines are like working with farm equipment, heavy dangerous and with ok-ish ppe which is usually not enough.
Just look at the burn pits fiasco.
However, the gap between ground crew rates and air crew rates, plus known similar effects in civilian airliner crew (https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cancer.html) indicates that it's likely that a significant component of increased risk for pilots and aircrew may be related to high altitude.
This doesn't rule out something like... increased exposure to flame-retardants (or something) (fabrics, other materials, or maybe off-gasing into air supply) that may be carcinogenic.
I don't think Benzene is the main risk factor for those type of cancers . Benzene causes blood cancers, lymphomas.
My point was more that there's more common risk factors. And for the flight crew, maybe they should ease off on volleyball :P
I do wonder if there’s a link between that agent Orange and the stupid adrenal tumor I had.
I was surprised by the claim, so I looked into the linked source: "You would be exposed to about 0.035 mSv (3.5 mrem) of cosmic radiation if you were to fly within the United States from the east coast to the west coast. This amount of radiation is less than the amount of radiation we receive from one chest x-ray."
I note that it says _less than_ in the source, so let's compare the actual numbers -- it's 0.035 mSv for the flight (from the first source) and 0.1 mSv for the chest x-ray (from https://www.cancer.org/treatment/understanding-your-diagnosi...). It does seem fair to say they are similar. The cancer.org source also notes that you'd normally be exposed to about 0.1 mSv naturally over the course of about 10 days. So we can say the flight from NYC to LA is ~4 days of natural radiation exposure.
The predominant wisdom is the linear no threshold model - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
and the counter argument, the radiation hormesis hypothesis - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis