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- Hacker News
- Anyone who lived in USSR, or otherwise familiar with the way soviet authorities operate, would know not to trust any official data from USSR. I personally treat any statistics and data from the soviet government to be unreliable to the degree of meaninglessness.
So, in my eyes, there is no info available about the true health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine and Belarus.
by freetonik - > Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.
They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.
I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.
I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.
As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
edit: s/by I'd like/but I'd like/
by gurjeet - Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.by Symmetry
- From the first hand: I was in the air base service regiment, Ovruch ( 30 km from reactor ), 1 year in service at the time of disaster.
The average numbers have a little sense. By our measurements, it was't an "even" distribution, but some "hot spots" that had 10x time radiation level than surrounding territory.
The article focuses on cancer, but for me and my buddies, the worst was an impact on immune system. In the six months after disaster, the healthy boy before, I got: pneumonia, chicken pox ( and 2 more with me ), furunculosis ( the whole company got it as well ), and endless flu/fevers. The weak immune continued for about 10 years.
by alexsmirnov - Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.
Here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10640654/
by m3047 - It sounds like the shape of the dose response curve for chronic low dose radiation is controversial. There's a lack of definitive evidence either way and reasonable arguments in both directions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis and other independent sources.
This article is making the case in one direction and is biased. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I wouldn't walk away using this as your only source on the topic.
by tomq - > Fifteen people have already died of these cancers
Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.
by deepsun - Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
> I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]
by throw0101a