Hello everyone! Welcome back to our blog. In our last post, we introduced radiation to you and discussed the importance of understanding issues instead of being afraid of what we do not know. This ties in closely with our blog’s idea, which was to make legislation easier to understand for a wider audience and hope that we all have a better understanding of the laws surrounding pollution. This is in hopes that more people understand the concerns of the world due to pollution. We got carried away when writing the effects of radiation and will break down the posts separately to discuss the impacts of radiation contamination to our health and environment.
In our next few posts, we will be discussing the effects of radiation, specifically ionising radiation (which are mainly X-rays and Gamma rays), which has harmful effects to our health and environment (UWHealth, 2020; Zamanian & Hardiman, 2005). Once again, we will be looking at anthropogenic sources of radiation although we did mention that half of our radiation exposure annually is natural in our previous post (Watson, Jones, Oatway, & Hughes, 2005). As Professor Taylor mentioned in his lectures many times debunking that “the dose makes the poison” due to other factors (Hill, 2010), the effects of hormesis can be seen in the case of natural (or background) radiation exposure to humans at low doses, or humanity would have perished long ago (Luckey, 2020).
Accumulated at low dosage over time
The first effects that we will be looking at will be radiation’s effects on human health. As mentioned in our previous post, exposure to radiation can be split into two types: accumulating slowly and acute with a sudden increase in exposure. We would like to preface that we cannot conclude that radiation is the cause of disease or death as there are many confounders when related to epidemiological research. Thus, we can only illustrate correlation and not causation.
We will begin our discussion on accumulated effects of radiation on health. According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2005, it is noted that radiation exposure may be higher than normal for people living near the regions surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant since the disaster in 1986. Yet, the effects of accumulated radiation exposure seem to not be due to nuclear wastes emitting radiation, but the effects of eating contaminated foods post-disaster. In the case of children developing thyroid cancer from the contaminated food, only 9 of 4000 recorded cases led to deaths while almost all of the survivors recovered from cancer (WHO, 2005). Additionally, it is noted that the ill-effects of radiation accumulation leading to leukaemia is only positively associated with individuals who are constantly exposed to medical radiation (Leuraud et al., 2015).
In this case, for many individuals who are not exposed to high levels of radiation, we need not worry too much about accumulated radiation affecting our health at low doses as humans can withstand the poison, that is, ionising radiation. Similarly, radiation exposure is closely regulated in Singapore through the Radiation Protection Act and its subsidiary legislations (SSO, 2007). In the case of radiation exposure, the effective dose limit for members of the public is 1mSv per year (NEA, 2019). For comparison, it has been noted that there is no detrimental health effects by radiation below 100 mSv and could even be beneficial (Vaiserman, Koliada, Zabuga, & Socol, 2018).
Nothing much to fear after all?
In this post, we discussed about the cumulative effects of radiation on our health. Once again, it is important to stress that we are not doctors or professionals in this field. We are, however, writing in the hopes that we do not live in a society fearing the effects of radiation. In our next post, we will look at the harmful effects of radiation contamination, with most of these stemming from the lasting psychological impacts of radiation on human health.
See you there!
Ryan
References
Hill, M. K. (2010). Understanding Environmental Pollution: Cambridge University Press.
Leuraud, K., Richardson, D. B., Cardis, E., Daniels, R. D., Gillies, M., O’Hagan, J. A., . . . Moissonnier, M. (2015). Ionising radiation and risk of death from leukaemia and lymphoma in radiation-monitored workers (INWORKS): an international cohort study. The Lancet Haematology, 2(7), e276-e281.
Luckey, T. D. (2020). Radiation hormesis: CRC press.
NEA. (2019). Ionising Radiation. Retrieved from https://www.nea.gov.sg/our-services/radiation-safety/regulatory/ionising-radiation
SSO. (2007). Radiation Protection Act. Retrieved from https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/RPA2007.
UWHealth. (2020). Radiation Exposure: Risks and Health Effects. Retrieved from https://www.uwhealth.org/health/topic/special/radiation-exposure-risks-and-health-effects/abl0600.html
Vaiserman, A., Koliada, A., Zabuga, O., & Socol, Y. (2018). Health impacts of low-dose ionizing radiation: current scientific debates and regulatory issues. Dose-Response, 16(3), 1559325818796331.
Watson, S., Jones, A., Oatway, W., & Hughes, J. (2005). Ionising radiation exposure of the UK population: 2005 review: Health Protection Agency Chilton, Oxon.
WHO. (2005). Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident.
Zamanian, A., & Hardiman, C. (2005). Electromagnetic radiation and human health: A review of sources and effects. High Frequency Electronics, 4(3), 16-26.