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MIT Study: Prolonged Low-level Radiation Exposure Poses Little Risk
JSBiff sends this quote from MITnews:
"A new study from MIT scientists suggests that the guidelines governments use to determine when to evacuate people following a nuclear accident may be too conservative. The study (abstract), led by Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times greater than background levels for five weeks, no DNA damage could be detected. Current U.S. regulations require that residents of any area that reaches radiation levels eight times higher than background should be evacuated. However, the financial and emotional cost of such relocation may not be worthwhile, the researchers say."
...the financial and emotional cost to the unfortunate statistical cancer patient and family.
How about this: Do not force evacuation, but provide the necessary resources for those who want evacuation (which will be all the folks with an 80 IQ or higher).
The article says low levels of exposure for five weeks resulted in no DNA damage. Five weeks is nothing, people living in contaminated areas will be there for years, and once radioactive material gets inside them it will be there for the rest of their lives. That is where the biggest danger is, long term internal exposure to material absorbed by the body into the organs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Given the number of times one experts study is tossed out by another experts study why should I trust this 1 study, and what kind of assurances does anyone have that their isn't some kind of error and will be tossed out or ignored with the next study. How am I to know if this study wan't done to justify low level back scatter scanners at air port, and has fallen victim to confirmation bias of one form or anther?
My girlfriend loves my new found third leg. Thanks, radiation!
How can they really test every cell to determine if there has been damage? A longer term study monitoring cancer rates would be more useful. I'm not saying that we shouldn't question the current guidelines, but changing them because of a short study like this would be crazy.
3 mile island = ok, chernobyl = bad China Syndrome = run for your life.
and don't go any where near SNPP
The next step is to stick some Iodine-125 down the researchers pants and see how things turn out for them.
Maybe there is something to the theory of Radiation hormesis where low level radiation may be good for your health
Just pointing out that in most places background is pretty low. Eight times higher in a low background area isn't the same as say eight times higher in an area that already has a higher than normal background count (for example New Hampshire, the Granite (and slightly more radioactive than normal) State.
Also internal exposure increases the damage from radiation by a factor of ten. At a does the equivalent of 80x background, you might want to move.
The mice turned green, grew to immense proportions and began pimp slapping the researchers around like they were red-headed step children!
I think, quite honestly, that MIT hasn't had smart people for a decade or two. Well, perhaps smart in the sense that they have high IQs and can pass tests, but not smart in the sense of creative and industrious. I graduated in the mid-'80s during a shift in focus from academic adventure to business appeal. And we all knew we could make a lot of money on Wall Street but only then did a significant number start taking taking up those seductive offers.
MIT now suffers the same problem as every other institute of higher learning: you get grants by writing lots of stuff providing it's technically correct, and it's really easy to write a lot of irrelevant or misleading stuff which is technically correct..
Btw, 100x background for 5 weeks is still less than the maximum year-long dose. Check the should-now-be-iconic xkcd radiation chart.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
it looks to me like the exposure was entirely external.
if you're breathing, eating, drinking and washing in the source then it's much more likely to be problematic.
There's nothing I detest more than some douche who has spent some time
at a university telling us all "we have nothing to fear".
Oddly, there's nothing I detest more than some idiot who is terribly afraid of something long after it's been proven to be safe.
I'd happily live in an area with 200x the level of background radiation (hey, my AT&T reception couldn't get any worse). The best benefit is that I can be sure compete morons like yourself will not be neighbors.
They said that about DDT.
Um, yeah...because DDT is safe. And millions have been killed from malaria that could have been saved without idiots like yourself "protecting" them.
Moron.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How much energy do you think, a cell has to absorb for any of this "oxidative stress" crap to happen?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
And that, ladies an gentlemen, is what happens you you derive your scientific opinion fro popular science articles.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At Chernobyl - wildlife have been reported to have lower survival and reproduction rates, with clear pathological effects to sperm.
This data point may be valid (it's a complex problem), but you have to wonder when the sponsor (DOE) reason to want this outcome.
I work with extremely sensitive radiation detectors at work; our typical energy is gamma at 511keV.
These gammas are derived from artificial radioactive sources, with a short half-life.
Testing these detectors is extremely informative; natural cosmic rays are much more worrisome to me than the sources...
I see 10-20GeV pulses at around 1-5 per minute; that's about all the energy they can dump in my detector, lol.
2x 8" lead bricks do not appreciably attenuate these cosmics at all; amazingly, underground missile silos were built to a spec! :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
My teacher, who has a PhD in Radiobiology, once did an experiment on the subject. He had two groups of mice. One of the groups was exposed to laser radiation. The other one was a control group. Both groups were then subjected to high energy ionizing radiation. Guess what: the ones who were exposed to the laser had a high survival rate than the ones who were not. So there is this belief that very low levels of radiation might actually activate your body's repair system without doing much damage. The caveat may be an increased incidence of mutations. We do not have many reliable methods to quantify that.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
Are the mice a good model for human radiation risk?
Radiation induce cancer, but that does not mean cancer will thrive. It needs to be promoted. Diet and environment contain promoters. I suspect the mice in the experiment were not fed with growth hormone treated beef, for instance. First-world humans tend to have a diet that highly promotes cancer, therefore their risk may be higher than the mice in the study.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qljXevEW2W0
you are a moron. you dont deserve the name geekoid, you should have it stripped. this guy is 100% correct. mice and guinea pigs and many mammals but not humans produce all the vitamin C they need. Also vitamin C needs are greatly magnified during stress.
see if you can find a book by an author called en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Cilento
trove.nla.gov.au/work/9585574
The most important detoxification system in the body is the SuperOxidiseDimutase family of enzymes. These enzymes protect against the SuperOxide radical O_2^-1 which is produced as a normal result of cellular energy production, energy is under more demand in times of stress. SOD turns the superoxide radical into hydrogenperoxide which is far more stable and safer in comparison. The SuperOxide radical is comparitively unstable, although peroxynitrite and other nitrogen radicals are pretty bad too. then there are the really toxic elements like Hg. The SOD enzyme needs a peptide called Glutathione as a rate limiting cofactor.
Glutathione is also recycled amongst other thing, by Vitamin C.
This peptide is recycled by rebuilding it from aminoacids glycine, glutamic acid and cysteine. It is also one of the most important peptides in the brain in glial cells. The xCT cysteine glutamate antiporter on glial cells is orders of magnitude faster than the other gultamate transporters which are needed for a signal which has been received to be brought back down to zero as quickly as possible. without this your brain becomes less efficient and you cannot cope with stress, and cannot effectively reach higher levels of arousal associated with higher mental functions.
studies are occuring and the results will be much more widely known soon enough. But right now lots of people are in the know about this and are just happy to have discovered something which can restore normality to severely disrupted lives.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00889538
oh and for your interest ive done a bsc, followed by first class honours in mathematics and working on a phd in mathematics, sure ive only taken chem to 2nd year, with some 3rd year topics, but he is 100% and you are ignorantly censoring one of the most relevant posts on this topic. this is a topic ive spent months of my life researching solidly. using all the journal subscriptions i have access to as a research student, plus subscription services like Web Of Knowledge/Science.
Finally you, or hopefully someone who is more open-minded should look into the Neuroreplete system. Read the publications of Dr Marty Hinz and then come back and appologise to the Slashdot community for ignorantly and calously censoring a genuine true post intended to inform and empower those that care about human life.
the parent is actually 100% factually correct, and has an extremely practical and salient post!
why has he been dismissed and the ridicule compounded by a series of yes men morons who want to frame him as misled or that it would mislead others. and these morons are getting moded up? wtf
oxidative stress is real and it will (very slowly, possibly via a major illness) kill you
slashdot has really become fucked if this kind of moronic censorship is done to the most valid and directly salient post on the page
Guinea pigs should be in the same category as humans and have a corrupt gene for the last step in the synthesis of VitC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-gulonolactone_oxidase
If yes you might want to read this : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
With an average 7.6mSv per year Cornwall is well above 8 times average background radiation.
I find this a bit amusing actually, I recently noticed three interesting figures.
1) Natural background radiation near chernobyl is 2.4mSv/yrs
2) The exclusion zone was defined as "everywhere with at least 1mSv/yrs increase)"
3) Finland has a natural background radiation of about 9mSv/yrs
Is it time to evacuate finland?
(I can't find the sources right now, I now this makes me a bad person but if someone has more finegrained data I would appreciate links to it)
Yet another scientific truth foretold by the 1984 film Repo Man. May I direct your attention to Dr J. Frank Parnell's statement below:
"Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year."
So many learned men and women whittle their time away with scientific method and linear accelerators while they could easily discover all knowledge by renting this flick. Remember this next time you hear "plate-o-shrimp"!!
First 5 weeks is not even the biological half-lives of some of the crap you could be exposed to as a result of a nuclear accident.
Second how the hell are they able to know if there is DNA damage in any cells of a whole mouse? You can sample cells and use statistical methods but this approach has limits since there is no way in hell you can check them all. It only takes one fucked up cell to fuck up the whole mouse or some real number of the millions of mice around a real nuclear incident.
I'm more apt to believe huge studies measuring outcomes rather than cellular processes complete with their hallmark inconclusive and sometimes contradictory results than I am to buy what is being sold here.