The Effects of Low-dose Radiation
In 1990, the International Journal of Radiological Biology published a paper by M. Mine and his team of Japanese researchers entitled “Apparently beneficial effect of low to intermediate doses of A-Bomb radiation on human life-span.”* Mine’s team gleaned data from the “Health Handbook” that A-Bomb survivors were required to keep, recording every health change. They scrutinized data on over 80,000 subjects whose locations could be pinpointed at the time of the blasts, and determined the correlation between the relative risk of death and the dose of radiation received.
* International Journal of Radiological Biology, 58:1035, 1990.
The study indicated quite the opposite of what was expected. The healthiest survivors were those who received approximately 10,000 mrem (millirems) of radiation in a very short time — a second or less. (See the main cover-story article for a discussion of radiation dose measurements.) This is about three million times the highest dose rate of radiation in the exclusion zone adjacent to the Fukushima complex — which has been in the news because of the radioactive releases there resulting from the 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami. The amount of radiation received by the healthiest survivors is approximately equal to 105 years of radiation that one might now be exposed to in Tokyo at the current rate of 0.109 microsieverts per hour, which is causing foreigners to return home where radiation levels are in many cases, ironically, much higher than Tokyo.
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