(Press-News.org) Radiation from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may eventually cause anywhere from 15 to 1,300 deaths and from 24 to 2,500 cases of cancer, mostly in Japan, Stanford researchers have calculated.
The estimates have large uncertainty ranges, but contrast with previous claims that the radioactive release would likely cause no severe health effects.
The numbers are in addition to the roughly 600 deaths caused by the evacuation of the area surrounding the nuclear plant directly after the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and meltdown.
Recent PhD graduate John Ten Hoeve and Stanford civil engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, are set to publish their findings Tuesday (July 17) in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. The research constitutes the first detailed analysis of the event's global health effects.
No effects?
The Fukushima Daiichi meltdown was the most extensive nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Radiation release critically contaminated a "dead zone" of several hundred square kilometers around the plant, and low levels of radioactive material were found as far as North America and Europe.
But most of the radioactivity was dumped in the Pacific – only 19 percent of the released material was deposited over land – keeping the exposed population relatively small.
"There are groups of people who have said there would be no effects," said Jacobson.
A month after the disaster, the head of the United Nations Science Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, for example, predicted that there would be no serious public health consequences resulting from the radiation.
Global reach?
Evaluating the claim, Ten Hoeve and Jacobson used a 3-D global atmospheric model, developed over 20 years of research, to predict the transport of radioactive material. A standard health-effects model was used to estimate human exposure to radioactivity.
Because of inherent uncertainties in the emissions and the health-effects model, the researchers found a range of possible death tolls, with a best estimate of 130. A wide span of cancer morbidities was also predicted, with a best estimate of 180.
Those affected according to the model were overwhelmingly in Japan, with extremely small effects noticeable in mainland Asia and North America. The United States was predicted to suffer between 0 and 12 deaths and 0 and 30 cancer morbidities, although the methods used were less precise for areas that saw only low radionuclide concentrations.
"These worldwide values are relatively low," said Ten Hoeve. He explained they should "serve to manage the fear in other countries that the disaster had an extensive global reach."
The response
The Japanese government's response was much more rapid and coordinated than that of the Soviets in Chernobyl, which may have mitigated some of the cancer risk.
Japanese government agencies, for example, evacuated a 20-kilometer radius around the plant, distributed iodine tablets to prevent radioiodine uptake and prohibited cultivation of crops above a radiation threshold – steps that Ten Hoeve said "people have applauded."
But the paper also notes that nearly 600 deaths were reported as a result of the evacuation process itself, mostly due to fatigue and exposure among the elderly and chronically ill. According to the model, the evacuation prevented at most 245 radiation-related deaths – meaning the evacuation process may have cost more lives than it saved.
Still, the researchers cautioned against drawing conclusions about evacuation policy.
"You still have an obligation to evacuate people according to the worst-case scenario," said Jacobson.
If it happened here
To test the effects of varying weather patterns and geography on the reach of a nuclear incident, the two researchers also analyzed a hypothetical scenario: an identical meltdown at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, near San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Despite California's population density being about one-fourth that of Japan's, the researchers found the magnitude of the projected health effects to be about 25 percent larger.
The model showed that rather than being whisked toward the ocean, as with Fukushima, a larger percentage of the Diablo Canyon radioactivity deposited over land, including population centers such as San Diego and Los Angeles.
Jacobson stressed, however, that none of the calculations expressed the full scope of a nuclear disaster.
"There's a lot more to the issue than what we examined, which were the cancer-related health effects," he said. "Fukushima was just such a large disaster in terms of soil and water contamination, displacement of lives, confidence in government oversight, cost and anguish."
###
Mark Z. Jacobson, Civil and Environmental Engineering: (650) 723-6836, jacobson@stanford.edu
'Worldwide Health Effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident,' Energy and Environmental Science, at Mark Z. Jacobson's Fukushima research page:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/fukushima.html
END
BOSTON – A new way of mapping how physicians share patients provides opportunities for improving the quality of medical care and organizing the nature of care delivery, according to researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.
In a study published in the July 18 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers suggest this new way of systematically looking at how physicians are organized into patient-sharing networks can shed light on practice variation, aid in the spread of innovation and help form natural groups ...
More children are surviving cancer in Britain than ever before according to new research published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Wednesday). The improvement in survival has been driven by the increasing numbers taking part in clinical trials since 1977 when the UK Children's Cancer Study Group (UKCCSG) [2] was established.
The UKCCSG's principal aim was to set up a comprehensive portfolio of national and international trials for the majority of children's cancers. As result, between 1978 and 2005 two-thirds of children diagnosed with cancer in Britain ...
It is a cellular component so scarce, some scientists even doubted its existence, and many others gave up searching for its molecular structure. Now a team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins has defined the protein structural composition of mitoKATP, a potassium channel in the mitochondria of the heart and other organs that is known to protect against tissue damage due to a heart attack or stroke. Importantly, the newly found channel strongly improves heart cell survival, demonstrating an essential life-saving role.
In a report to be published in the journal Circulation ...
Johns Hopkins researchers say they have discovered a cause-and-effect relationship between two well-established biological risk factors for schizophrenia previously believed to be independent of one another.
The findings could eventually lead researchers to develop better drugs to treat the cognitive dysfunction associated with schizophrenia and possibly other mental illnesses.
Researchers have long studied the role played in the brain's neurons by the Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) gene, a mutation with one of the strongest links to an increased risk of developing ...
A detailed study of heart muscle function in mice has uncovered evidence to explain why exercise is beneficial for heart function in type 2 diabetes. The research team, led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found that greater amounts of fatty acids used by the heart during stressful conditions like exercise can counteract the detrimental effects of excess glucose and improve the diabetic heart's pumping ability in several ways. The findings also shed light on the complex chain of events that lead to diabetic cardiomyopathy, a form of heart ...
July 17, 2012, Shenzhen, China – BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, announced today that it has successfully developed a new filtering tool, PDXomics, which performs accurate and specific classification of the mixed reads derived from the host and tumor xenografts. Through the full utilization of this robust tool, researchers could develop the specific patient-derived xenografts (PDX) and advance the oncology drug discovery, biomarker development and their future applications.
Xenograft models serve as an important tool for many areas of biomedical research, ...
Finding renewable and economic sources of energy are one of the most important concerns for the continuation of the human species. New research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, has produced a novel strain of yeast with improved xylose tolerance and metabolism, and consequently improved ethanol production.
Bioethanol is considered one of cleanest renewable replacements for fossil fuel. However using glucose from crops, such as sugar cane or starch crops, uses up resources which could otherwise be used to produce food. Xylose ...
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Silymarin or "milk thistle," a popular herbal dietary supplement that many people take for liver ailments, works no better than placebo in patients with chronic hepatitis C infection.
That's the conclusion of a multicenter clinical trial published in the July 18, 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Patients ask me about milk thistle all the time," said Michael W. Fried, MD, lead author of the study, a professor in the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and director of the UNC Liver Center.
"Now I can tell ...
Several types of job carried out by future fathers may be linked to an increased risk of birth defects in their babies, suggests research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Previous research has linked certain occupations with a higher risk of birth defects in offspring. But it has tended to lump together very different types of defects and occupations, in order to achieve large sample sizes, with the attendant potential to skew the results, say the authors.
They base their findings on data from the ongoing US National Birth Defects Prevention ...
Workplace exposure to organic solvents is linked to several types of heart defects at birth, indicates research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Organic solvents are widely used for dissolving or dispersing substances, such as fats, oils, and waxes, as well as in chemical manufacturing. They are found in paints, varnishes, adhesives, degreasing/cleaning agents, dyes, polymers, plastic, synthetic textiles, printing inks and agricultural products.
Most organic solvents are highly volatile and enter the body through the lungs, but can also ...
