“What would happen if you’re living close to a dump site, or something like that? You’re talking about a chronic everyday low-dose-rate exposure.”Įstimating the dose of radiation each bomb survivor received is difficult because the dose varied depending on how close they were to the hypocenters - the point of explosion. “The atomic bomb happened in one crack, people were exposed, and then that was it,” Gayle Woloschak, a biologist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago, Illinois told Popkin. Yet recently, scientists have started to question whether this caution is needed. "These radiation standards are accepted worldwide," George Kerr, a consultant and health physicist, formerly of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory told Paul Voosen for The New York Times. Based on this relationship, regulators assume that even minute doses of radiation can increase cancer risk and set guidelines accordingly to limit workers’ exposure in nuclear energy facilities, uranium mines and other workplaces. The one exception is leukemia, for which a doubling of the radiation dose can quadruple risk. In the decades since, the survivors have become one of the longest-studied groups in health research. Studies with 94,000 survivors through an American-Japanese partnership called the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF, indicate that the risk of most cancers doubles with a doubling of radiation exposure. "Radiation biology was still in its infancy," writes Gabriel Popkin for Inside Science, "and no one had ever studied the effects of an exposure even remotely on the scale of that delivered by atomic weapons." But no one could say exactly what the long-term health effects would be for the people who survived. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945, the powerful explosions and destruction that followed were expected.
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