Scientists lack complete answers about radiation risks.
Associated Press-Mother and daughter receive radiation scans in Fukushima, northern Japan, Associated Press ... Associated Press-FRI March 18 at 6: 2 pm1
It must be thyroid cancer. Could be leukemia. Scientists agree that too much radiation will increase the risk of cancer in a few years, and young people are the most vulnerable. However, it is not clear how much or how long the exposure risk is.
With the development of the crisis of damaged nuclear power plants in Japan, these are all unknown factors that scientists are considering.
In Japan, the Ministry of Science and Technology said that the radiation level about 19 miles northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant once rose to 0. 15 millisieverts per hour on Friday, which is about the amount absorbed by chest X-rays. But the radiation level has been fluctuating, and the radiation in most places so far away from nuclear facilities is far below this level.
In the long run, radiation will obviously induce cancer. But researchers can't just count cancer cases after a disaster and then declare that radiation is the culprit. It is necessary to compare the ratio before and after to see if there are more cases than expected.
This is why, 25 years after the Chernobyl accident, in addition to the undisputed 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer, its impact is still controversial. As of 2005, only 15 of these cases proved fatal, although the Soviet Union was slow to treat disaster victims.
Dr Fred mettler, a scientist at the University of New Mexico, said that due to the Chernobyl accident, there were few necessary records to find the trend of other types of cancer, and he led a team funded by the United Nations to investigate the health effects of Chernobyl.
"In the final analysis, scientific data does not exist. My intuition is that there may be growth there, but it is too small to see, "he said."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that it is absolutely safe to get more radiation than the 3 to 6 millisieverts that most of us get from our normal life every year. In contrast, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that low doses-below 100 millisieverts for many years-are harmless. Kelly Clark, a radiation physicist at the Mayo Clinic and a spokesman for the Health Physics Society, a radiation safety expert organization, said that researchers had not recorded the danger of such low levels of radiation.
High doses-more than 500 millisieverts-increase the risk of leukemia, breast cancer, bladder cancer and colon cancer.