[Update]
Dr. Busby has done a nice video on the impact of radioactive Cesium on all people but especially small children.
This is Nika, I am helping Iori with this very important blog on Fukushima.
Much has been said in the media about the technical aspects of nuclear power, Fukushima, etc.
We are now beginning to hear about people getting sick.
This new category of posts will provide verified and – where possible – peer reviewed information on the effects of both chronic low and high dose radiation on the body. Other topics may arise when needed.
The past few days both unconfirmed reports and published reports have been pointing to acute onset cardiac arrest in previously healthy young people in Japan.
I am going to provide links to a relevant scientific paper here.
Mark P. Little, Anna Gola, Ioanna Tzoulaki
Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
Abstract
Atherosclerosis is the main cause of coronary heart disease and stroke, the two major causes of death in developed society. There is emerging evidence of excess risk of cardiovascular disease at low radiation doses in various occupationally exposed groups receiving small daily radiation doses. Assuming that they are causal, the mechanisms for effects of chronic fractionated radiation exposures on cardiovascular disease are unclear. We outline a spatial reaction-diffusion model for atherosclerosis and perform stability analysis, based wherever possible on human data. We show that a predicted consequence of multiple small radiation doses is to cause mean chemo-attractant (MCP-1) concentration to increase linearly with cumulative dose. The main driver for the increase in MCP-1 is monocyte death, and consequent reduction in MCP-1 degradation. The radiation-induced risks predicted by the model are quantitatively consistent with those observed in a number of occupationally-exposed groups. The changes in equilibrium MCP-1 concentrations with low density lipoprotein cholesterol concentration are also consistent with experimental and epidemiologic data. This proposed mechanism would be experimentally testable. If true, it also has substantive implications for radiological protection, which at present does not take cardiovascular disease into account. The Japanese A-bomb survivor data implies that cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality contribute similarly to radiogenic risk. The major uncertainty in assessing the low-dose risk of cardiovascular disease is the shape of the dose response relationship, which is unclear in the Japanese data. The analysis of the present paper suggests that linear extrapolation would be appropriate for this endpoint.