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Nuclear Crisis in Japan Raises Worries About Radiation Risks

May 26th, 2011 at 08:48am Under Health report

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

The crisis at the damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Station in northern Japan has raised worries about radiation risks. We spoke Tuesday with Jonathan Links,  an expert in radiation health sciences. He is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.

Professor Links says workers within the nuclear plant are the only people at risk of extremely high doses of radiation.

JONATHAN LINKS: “Of course, we don’t know what doses they’ve received, but the only persons at risk of acute radiation effects are the workers.”

For other people, he says, there may be a long-term worry. People can get cancer from low doses of ionizing radiation, the kind released in a nuclear accident.

Professor Links says scientists can use computers to quickly model where radioactive material has blown and settled. Then they measure how large an area is contaminated. He says if the situation is serious enough, officials could take steps like telling people not to eat locally grown food or drink the water.

JONATHAN LINKS: “But that would only be the case if there was a significant release and, because of wind direction, the radioactive material was blown over the area, and then settled out of the air into and onto water, plants, fruits and vegetables.”

The reactors at Fukushima are on the Pacific coast. But Professor Links says people should not worry about any radioactive material leaking into the ocean.

JONATHAN LINKS: “Even in a worst-case scenario accident, the sea provides a very high degree of dilution. So the concentration of radioactivity in the seawater would still be quite low.”

Japan is the only country to have had atomic bombs dropped on it. That memory from  World War Two would create a stronger “psychological sensitivity” to radiation exposure, Professors Links says.

Next month is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the explosion and fire that destroyed a reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. The nineteen eighty-six event was the world’s worst accident in the nuclear power industry.

A new United Nations report says more than six thousand cases of thyroid cancer have been found. These are in people who were children in affected areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. The report says that by two thousand five the cancers had resulted in fifteen deaths.

The cancers were largely caused by drinking contaminated milk. The milk came from cows that ate grass where radioactive material had fallen.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Caty Weaver. To get the latest updates, go to voaspecialenglish.com. I’m Steve Ember.

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Contributing: James Brooke

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Smoking and the Risk to Women’s Lungs

July 3rd, 2009 at 02:29am Under Health report

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

C.O.P.D., chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, blocks airflow through the lungs. It makes breathing difficult. The leading cause is cigarette smoking. Experts at the National Institutes of Health in the United States say the damage to the lungs cannot be repaired and there is no cure.

Dawn DeMeo is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

DAWN DeMEO: “By two thousand and twenty, C.O.P.D. will likely be the third leading cause of death across the world.”

C.O.P.D. is a new name for emphysema and chronic bronchitis. These are the two most common forms of the disease. Many people with C.O.P.D. have both of them. And Doctor DeMeo says more women than men now die from the disease.

She is the lead author of a study by a team from Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the University of Bergen in Norway. The new study adds to findings that women may be more at risk than men for the damaging effects of smoking.

The team examined results from a Norwegian study of nine hundred fifty-four people with C.O.P.D. Inga-Cecilie Soerheim co-authored the team’s findings. Doctor Soerheim says they show that women suffered the same severity of C.O.P.D. as men. But, by comparison, the female smokers were younger and had smoked a lot less.

The team also looked at two groups among the people in the study. These were people under the age of sixty and those who had smoked for less than twenty years. In both cases, women had more severe C.O.P.D. and a greater loss of lung function than men.

Doctor DeMeo says some of the people in the study did not smoke much but still developed severe lung disease.

DAWN DeMEO: “Many people underestimate the health risks of their own cigarette consumption, thinking that a few cigarettes here and there, a few cigarettes every day, are harmless. But clearly there is no such thing as a safe level of cigarette smoke exposure. And our findings suggest that this is particularly true for women.”

The study was presented last month to the American Thoracic Society.

Doctor Soerheim says there are several possible explanations why women may be more at risk from the effects of cigarette smoke than men. Women have smaller airways, she says, so each cigarette may do more harm. Also, there are differences between males and females in the way the body processes cigarette smoke. And she says genes and hormones could also play an important part.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by June Simms. You can comment on our reports, and read what other people are saying, at voaspecialenglish.com. I’m Steve Ember.

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