Health effects of low level radiation: when will we acknowledge the reality? Dose Response

Abstract

Summary The 1986 April 26 th Chernobyl event was the worst nuclear power accident-it killed 31 people. Its significance was exaggerated immensely because of the pervasive fear of ionizing radiation that has been indoctrinated in all of humanity. In reality, our environment includes radiation from natural sources, varying widely in intensity, to which all living things have adapted. The effect of radiation on organisms is primarily on their damage control biosystem, which prevents, repairs and removes cell damage. Low doses stimulate this system, while high doses inhibit it. So low doses decrease the incidences of cancer and congenital malformations; high doses have the opposite effect. Efforts by radiation protection organizations to lower exposures to (humanmade) radiation to as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA) provide no benefit. They only create inappropriate fear-barriers to very important applications of nuclear technology in energy production and medicine. Keywords: Chernobyl, radiation hormesis, LNT hypothesis At the 20 th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the media commemorated the event with many stories designed to draw attention to its causes and consequences. The most important element was our fear of radiation. Did the media expose the fraud of the linear-no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis of radiation carcinogenesis (and congenital malformations)-the principal cause of this fear? The fear stems from the common belief that any dose of radiation increases the likelihood of the dreaded diseases: cancer and congenital malformations. No one questions the fact that any dose (1 Gray = 1 joule of ionizing radiation energy per kilogram of tissue) damages cells, and that large doses of radiation are harmful. Cancer and congenital malformations are diseases of living organisms, so it is essential to study the biology of organisms to understand how these diseases arise and determine whether this fear is based on myth or reality. In plain language, the LNT hypothesis-the linear extrapolation of the incidences of these diseases from the high dose range to the low dose range-is contradicted by a very large amount of evidence that has been accumulated since the discovery of ionizing radiation, more than a century ago. Some of this evidence appears in the references listed in this paper, and it is very important that the reader examine the evidence. The scientific method requires that a hypothesis be rejected or modified if just one fact contradicts the hypothesis. Scientific fraud occurs when this hypothesis is retained and employed, against the advice of technical societies, to predict the number of excess cancer deaths that will occur following a population exposure to radiation in the low dose range specifically the prediction of 4000 excess cancer fatalities following the Chernobyl accident