Take Two Cobalt 60s & Call Me in the Morning

If we really believed in the LNT, we would have to conclude that routine use of X-rays for medical purposes would cause 100,000 deaths each year. - Richard North, Alpha, 1997

Radiation and cancer are certainly strange bedfellows.

On the one hand there is a great deal of misplaced concern that the almost infinitesimally small emissions from nuclear power plants will cause widespread cancer and induce Farmer Jones's cow to give birth to two-headed calves. Yet when Farmer Jones contracts cancer (no doubt as a result of the power plant), one of the primary treatments is to destroy the cancer cells (which are unusually susceptible to radiation) with X-ray treatments or by implantation of radioactive "seeds" in the cancerous organ. And when Mrs. Farmer Jones has a hyperactive thyroid, she ingests enough iodine 131 to give her body 200 times the radiation dose - in about three weeks - that she receives over her lifetime from the natural background, to to mention the gamma radiation given to her good farmer husband from being next to him in bed. Furthermore, when little Billy Jones is found to have a fatal, inoperative brain tumor, the least invasive treatment is the "gamma knife" - a method of focusing 201 small gamma sources, which, individually, are too weak to cause any harm to anyone but the most fervent anti-nuke. Yet when they are concentrated on the offending growth together they have the power to vaporize it... and Billy goes home that afternoon completely cured. Is that a miracle or what?

However, we are not going to discuss this type of radiation therapy, since it involves the transfer of considerable amounts of energy to tissues - particularly tumors or cancers - in an attempt to destroy them or reduce their functionality. Instead, we will be concerned about the effects of comparatively tiny amounts of radiation whose purpose is to provoke the immune system into stepping up its action on the cellular level.

You may note in this chapter that virtually all of the current experimental activity mentioned is occurring in Japan, where the work of Dr. Luckey is revered - since, I suspect, it explains so much of what is happening to bomb survivors. But he Japanese have taken the matter much further, including hormetic augmentation of high-level therapies and measurement of the physiological reactions to radiation - including one that gives credence to an unusual treatment for arthritis that dates back to Roman times.

Hormesis U.: A Review

Before leaving dear old Hormesis U., here is a short review to see if you've got a handle on the curriculum. You should know...

• Elements are identified by the number of protons in the nucleus (atomic number).
• Isotopes of elements have different numbers of neutrons (n + p = atomic weight).
• Atoms of some isotopes are stable, while others are radioactive and, over time, will disintegrate (decay) into other elements of a lower atomic number.
• Alpha and beta particles have a short range (a few inches and a few feet respectively).
• Gamma rays and X-rays can penetrate several inches of steel or feet of concrete.
• The half-life of a radioactive isotope is the time it takes half of the original amount to decay; after thirty half-lives the original amount is considered to be gone.
• The longer the half-life, the lower the activity of an isotope.
• A curie is 37 billion becquerels.
• A pCi is a picocurie and is equal to one-trillionth (10^-12) of a curie.
• Absorbed doses of radiation are measured in rads or grays; 100 rads equal 1 gray.
• Biological doses are measured in rems or sieverts; 100 rems equal 1 sievert.
• The absorbed dose and the biological dose are the same for gamma and X-rays. 
• A fatal acute dose is about 4 sieverts or 400 rems (50% fatalities in thirty days) when received in a relatively short time (a few days or less).
• Radiation sickness occurs at about 1 sievert or 100 rems (50% of those exposed over a short time). 
• Doses below 1 sievert or 100 rems (100,000 millirems) have no immediate biologic effects but are generally thought to increase the risk of cancer in the future.

Thanks for your attendance at Hormesis U. No doubt you'll find the rest of the information on radiation hormesis much more understandable now than when you were a mere freshman. Oh, and be sure to send in your contribution to the Alumni Fund.

A "Media Created" Fear?

Dr. Bernard Cohen - who was group leader for cyclotron research at Oak Ridge about the same time I was researching my toes in the shoe store X-ray machine - had noticed a disparity between the deaths and injuries from radioactivity accidents and the media's concern over this danger. So, like the researcher he is, he obtained the number of entries in the New York Times Information Bank for the years 1974-1978 for various types of accidents and the death toll resulting from them. [Bernard Cohen, The Nuclear Energy Option, Plenum Press, New York, 1990, pp. 58-59.] (This avoided the Three Mile Island "disaster," which would have made the situation look much more ridiculous than it already does.) His data looked like Table 1.

Table 1: News Stories on Deaths from Various Causes [Source: New York Times Information Bank, 1974-1978.]

	News Stories	Deaths per Year	In Previous Decade
Auto accidents	120	50,000	500,000
Industrial accidents	50	12,000	120,000
Asphyxiation accidents	20	4,500	45,000
Radiation accidents	200	0	0

This table reminded me of two news stories I read less than a month apart some years ago, both of which reported more than twenty deaths in two separate geothermal well accidents in South America. Do you remember them? Or the dozens killed in refinery accidents and pipe line accidents? How about the 100 people that are killed each year from being hit by trains carrying coal for power generation? I guess those people are not as important as the people who didn't lose their lives in nuclear accidents.

Prologue

Radiation can be dangerous. So can ignorance.

The young woman had injured her wrist in a fall, and the swelling would not go down. She made an appointment with her family physician to have an X-ray to determine if any bones had been broken. Several X-rays were taken to obtain different views. In a few minutes, they were developed, and the wrist was found to have a slight crack that required the use of a splint for several weeks.

In a few days, the young woman, already a mother, began to feel those subtle, suspicious changes in her body. She went again to the doctor to find she tested pregnant. But the memory of her X-ray haunted her. She knew that all radiation was harmful, and that it could cause her to have a retarded (or worse) baby. The next evening, she spoke with a nurse in her Women's Club who shared the same nuclear nightmare. The nurse suggested that she consider an abortion. A consultation with her gynecologist found him in agreement. The "therapeutic" abortion eliminated the possibility of a deformed baby.

This story was related to me by the woman, who by chance was reading the first draft of this book. I took her information to a health physicist I had met and asked him to estimate the amount of radiation the fetus would have received from the 1960s or 1970s X-ray machine - and what its likely effect would have been. In a few minutes he told me that the fetus would have received less than half the radiation received from a coast-to-coast airline flight, and that the effect would have been entirely negligible.

Radiation can be dangerous. So can ignorance.

I wonder what my niece or nephew would have been like. So does my sister.