Children from Parents Exposed to Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Show No Genetic Damage (usnews.com) 80
HealthDay reports:
There's no evidence of genetic damage in the children of parents who were exposed to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Ukraine, researchers say.
Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the investigators analyzed the genomes of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born between 1987 and 2002.
There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville, Md.
Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the investigators analyzed the genomes of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born between 1987 and 2002.
There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville, Md.
No shit (Score:4, Informative)
Contrary to the hysterical paranoid anti-nuclear freaks, mild doses of radiation aren't dangerous, and might even be a good thing thanks to a process called hormesis. Scientific references:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
Re:No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Chernobyl and mild are two words not often used together.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
They should be. Chernobyl really didn't emit all that much stuff, contrary to popular rumour. And most of what it did emit would have been alpha emitters, which can be shielded by wrapping it in toilet paper....
Re:No shit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No shit (Score:5, Informative)
We built a sarcophagus, when we could have just TP'd the motherfucker?!!???!!
No, because the poster you are responding to is severely in error. From the wikipedia article:
Also this:
So it's not a simple matter of just blocking the radiation.
Re: (Score:3)
Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s (3.6 R/h)
Not great, not terrible.
Re: (Score:2)
"It's not 3.6, it's 15,000."
Re: (Score:2)
We built a sarcophagus, when we could have just TP'd the motherfucker?!!???!!
Get ouf of here, Stalker!
Re:No shit (Score:5, Informative)
Chernobyl really didn't emit all that much stuff, contrary to popular rumour.
The first responders who suffered severe radiation poisoning would beg to differ.
Re:No shit (Score:4, Informative)
It is one thing for those people who had to go inside the reactor room and quite another for people far away from it.
Re: (Score:2)
This is not in conflict with the observed fact that the vast majority of the population lived in areas that were not hard hit.
So Chernobyl shouldn't be minimized. But it also shouldn't be surprising that the population effects were quite small.
Re: (Score:3)
People die in industrial accidents. It can be radiation poisoning from a nuclear power reactor. It can be suffocation from a fire in a windmill nacelle. It can be falls from rooftop solar PV installations.
If we compare all energy sources on death per MWh then nuclear power wins by a large margin. If we consider only the USA then nuclear power looks even better because we don't allow drunken soviet bureaucrats to make engineering decisions at nuclear power plants in the USA.
Is nuclear power "safe"? No,
Re: (Score:2)
If you want to take a cold, rational look at it then you have to consider risk in terms of cost. If you build a power plant of type X, what is the cost and what is the potential liability?
In the case of nuclear the cost includes a great deal of safety equipment and process, as well as things like evacuation plants for nearby settlements and on-going safety checks for the lifetime of the plant, plus safe disposal for waste. Liability is basically unlimited, you will need some commercial insurance but it won'
Re: (Score:3)
Re:No shit (Score:5, Informative)
They should be. Chernobyl really didn't emit all that much stuff, contrary to popular rumour.
Tell that to the first responders. Oh wait, you can't. Most of them are dead from radiation poisoning. Then there is that little matter of whole city that was evacuated in the middle of the night. You know the one where nobody can live in to this day.
Re:No shit (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Out of approximately 600 emergency workers
Out of six hundred thousand emergency workers, so called "regulators" 480,000 (600,000 in case you do not know what six hundred thousand means) are dead.
Their death is what made the USSR collapse. Read a damn history book.
Re: No shit (Score:2)
Got any evidence 480,000 emergency workers died? Show me some sources on websites that donâ(TM)t have an anti-nuclear agenda.
Re: (Score:1)
Got any evidence 480,000 emergency workers died? Show me some sources on websites that donâ(TM)t have an anti-nuclear agenda.
You'll never get any from that guy. I had a few arguments with him, all he does is claim outlandish things, then tell you you're wrong when you post actual referenced data. Don't waste your time.
Re: (Score:2)
Greenpeace claims here that 500,000 worldwide had died, not limited to liquidators. They also put out 90,000 and 1,000,000 numbers. Their argument is no dose of radiation is safe, any exposure whatsoever shortens life so that if you were possibly exposed and died from any cause that could have possibly been influenced by radiation, it should count. Which isn't scientific, but isn't meant to be.
It's just bad stats, and they k
Re: (Score:2)
Greenpeace is most certainly distinguishing between direct death, as the liquidators, which is about ~500k from roughly ~600k - and the world wide other death.
As I never have read any Greenpeace stuff about this topic: I can not mix up anything anyway.
Re: No shit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.arte.tv/de/ [www.arte.tv]
Just google their TV shows about Chernobyl. Use the correct spelling. Unfortunately it is all in French or German.
Sorry, not my fault that "contemporary history" (which I'm actually a participant of) is not taught in your school.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
No idea what data you want.
When German/French TV states that ~480k of 600k liquidators are dead, then I assume it is true.
As you have no "data" either, I really wonder why you demand "data" from me.
Re: (Score:2)
I won't doubt that nearly all the Chernobyl liquidators are dead. That's because that happened over 30 years ago and the average life span for mean in Ukraine is less than 70 years. I don't recall a more precise number but life for a working class man in the USSR tends to be brutal and short.
I had a conversation with a Ukrainian physician online some time ago. He said most white collar men in the USSR tended to live a life much like white collar men in the USA. They could get a healthy diet, tended to n
Re: (Score:2)
I won't doubt that nearly all the Chernobyl liquidators are dead. That's because that happened over 30 years ago and the average life span for mean in Ukraine is less than 70 years.
Then you are missinformed.
Arte - German/Frensh TV broadcaster - were making every 5 year anniversary review and now a 10 year anniversary review about the disaster.
They try to find survivors and interview them. As the regulators were all conscript 18/19 year old recruits, they used to have veteran meetings. Like every military p
Re: (Score:1)
Tell that to the first responders. Oh wait, you can't. Most of them are dead from radiation poisoning. Then there is that little matter of whole city that was evacuated in the middle of the night. You know the one where nobody can live in to this day.
Oh that sounds scary. We should completely equate that with whatever it is nuclear today that you don't like...
Re: (Score:3)
Well it is scary, and you should be scared of it. It was the worse nuclear accident in history. An for good reason. The reactor was a piece of shit and the staff where poorly trained.
An for the record, I'm pro nuclear. I don't think we should have stopped development in the '70 all because of a bunch of smelly hippies. I think we should tell the current crop of anti nuke kooks to go fuck themselves and deploy safe modern reactors.
But with that being said I'm not going to pretend that Chernobyl was
Re: (Score:1)
The reactor was a piece of shit and the staff where poorly trained.
Exactly. So the lesson here is not Nuke = bad, but poorly managed high risk things = bad
An for the record, I'm pro nuclear. I don't think we should have stopped development in the '70 all because of a bunch of smelly hippies. I think we should tell the current crop of anti nuke kooks to go fuck themselves and deploy safe modern reactors.
And even worse, had the smelly hippies not got in the way then it is likely coal would already be dead. So the irony of the hippies is that they created coal industry for decades longer than we needed one. Stupid hippies.
But with that being said I'm not going to pretend that Chernobyl was a none even, lie to myself that nuclear power isn't dangerous if not done correctly, and I'm most certainly going to down play the sacrifice those first responders gave when it happened.
I think the OP was merely putting it into perspective. Most people, even some here, think that hundreds of thousands of people were killed by the meltdown, when it was closer to a few hundred. And in the
Re:No shit (Score:4)
And even worse, had the smelly hippies not got in the way then it is likely coal would already be dead. So the irony of the hippies is that they created coal industry for decades longer than we needed one. Stupid hippies.
Don't get me started on the hippies. That is a rant that nether of us will live long enough to finish.
Re: (Score:2)
Beyond that, it's virtually a matter of opinion. Folks like Greenpeace argue if you could say a single day was shaved off their theoretical life expectancy, it should count and their estimates are 600,000 to 900,000. No direct evidence, just their st
Re: (Score:2)
"They should be. Chernobyl really didn't emit all that much stuff, contrary to popular rumour. "
Speak for yourself, in Germany, the mushrooms in the forest are still full of cesium right now.
https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/... [www.bfs.de]
Re: (Score:2)
"They should be. Chernobyl really didn't emit all that much stuff, contrary to popular rumour. "
Yes, the tourism in that area is fantastic!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Chernobyl really didn't emit all that much stuff, contrary to popular rumour.
You couldn't be more wrong. In fact, this may be one of the most ridiculously wrong posts I've read since it blew up.
Stop spreading your moronically insidious bullshit.
If on the other hand, you were shooting for "stupid", you succeeded admirably.
Re: (Score:3)
It was much milder than the exposure of population to radiation from various tests conducted in the 1960es by both USA and USSR. By orders of magnitude in some cases. Some of the clouds from the bigger tests like Tsar Bomba circled the globe several times spreading Christmas cheer to everywhere they went.
Just in those days the media was told to keep shtum. And so they did.
Those have been studied too and the results are known: significant raise of defects in d
Re: (Score:2)
Defects or not but my ex GF lost her thyroid thanks to that accident.
Re: (Score:2)
Basically every fucking sentence is wrong.
Only the questions is: are you lying or simply plain stupid?
The whole movie crew of John Wayne died after they shot a movie in the desert of Nevada to cancer. They did certainly not spent very much time there ... and certainly did not get a "high dose of radiation". They inhaled the stuff in the desert dust.
In south Germany - how far away is that exactly from Chernobyl? - you still can not eat wild boar. Go figure, idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a gross over-simplification. When a reactor melts down it does not evenly an uniformly spread all the emitted radiation and contaminated material over a certain area. Some parts get little, some areas get high doses.
Therein lies the problem, you could walk around Chernobyl and see low levels of radiation, and then suddenly you come across a hot-spot where the reading is much higher and have to retreat. The risk increases if you disturb the environment e.g. by digging or demolishing old buildings.
Re: No shit (Score:2)
Considering it could have rendered much of Europe uninhabitable for hundreds of years at the least if the holding tanks hadn't been drained, Chernobyl was comparatively mild to what was within 72 hours of actually happening.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd recommend Plokhy's "Chernobyl: History of a Nuclear Catastrophe". The show deeply deeply deeply did not explain how bad the reactor design was. The graphite pipes were fragile, and loss of even a small number would
Re: (Score:1)
-Spidey
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientific references:
Unfortunately, in topics about radiation, public hysteria trumps science.
There was a similar effect in post-WW2 Japan. Folks from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were shunned by the rest of the Japanese population.
Re: (Score:3)
That's not the issue here. These children were not conceived until after their parents were exposed.
The question is if damage done to their parents' DNA could pass to them, or if accumulated contamination in their bodies could affect the child in the womb.
It appears not in both cases. Unsurprising considering what we know of human biology, but nice to have confirmed.
Re: (Score:2)
Unsurprising considering what we know of human biology, but nice to have confirmed.
That is actually not what we know.
We know if your sperms or the eggs of the mother get altered due to radiation: obviously that springs to the offsprings.
The only thing we can assume: the ridiculous low sample size of 139 couples had the luck that the egg and the single sperm out of billions that won the race: had no server damage.
Re: (Score:2)
The only thing we can assume: the ridiculous low sample size of 139 couples had the luck that the egg and the single sperm out of billions that won the race: had no server damage.
This sentence belies a complete lack of understanding of statistics.
139 is more than enough to find a statistical effect.
We can confine, with error intervals, how accurate the prediction will be (and they do in the paper)
There is always a chance that those 139 got lucky enough to avoid the statistical chance of mutated gametes, if one existed, but it's very, very small.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, this is potentially skewed, because eggs damaged severely enough would likely be non-viable, and either wouldn't result in a pregnancy or would result in a miscarriage, and thus presumably wouldn't count towards these statistics.
Re: (Score:2)
This sentence belies a complete lack of understanding of statistics.
139 is more than enough to find a statistical effect.
In a situation where 100million people are affected?
Sorry, you are an idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I've read, likewise nothing untoward observed in the wild animal populations living right in the hot zone, and a lot more generations of 'em.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Contrary to the hysterical paranoid anti-nuclear freaks, mild doses of radiation aren't dangerous, and might even be a good thing thanks to a process called hormesis. Scientific references: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
This study is literally survivorship bias, serious genetic defects in reproductive cells prevent them from forming a viable fetus in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
They, being better educated about statistics and scientific rigor than your average slashdot commenter, instead looked for evidence of *any* abnormal mutations.
They found no statistically significant increase over the background.
Re: (Score:2)
TASS has joined the chat.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong. All ionizing radiation is harmful. It is just that there already is quite a bit everybody gets exposed to and hence low additional doses still kill people, but these additional deaths are indistinguishable from ones caused by natural radiation sources.
Re: (Score:2)
That's just false. Not all ionizing radiation is harmful. First off, low doses of it may have a beneficial effect, by triggering repair functions in cells (which can fix damage by oxidants or other processes) AND it can cause cells that are in a pre-cancerous state to destroy themselves via a process called apoptosis. Reference: https://genesenvironment.biome... [biomedcentral.com]
Second, artificially produced ionizing radiation has SAVED far more lives than it has taken. Even when you account for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundr
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
Let me add to that, that a major unintended effect of cancer radiation theory is ... cancer. Just a different one. You can only win because you destroy a 100% cancer risk and trade it in for a smaller one.
Re: (Score:2)
Not saying this is the case, but it's definitely conceivable.
That also being said, there's good evidence in both directions, which makes it an unsettled question in science. But there is definitely evidence that LNT is wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe in a radiation free environment. What we have in earth is enough radiation to cause a lot of cancer. Add a bit, get a bit more cancer.
Re: (Score:2)
An example of the concept would be increasing tolerance to toxins.
To hypothesize on such a mechanism for ionizing radiation, we would imagine:
The body has some kind of mechanism triggered by ionizing radiation that causes it to become more vigilant in tumor search and destroy operations.
The more this mechanism was triggered, the better off you are at fighting cancer, up until the point where the mechanism is overwhelmed.
There is evidence that LNT is wrong, and that hormesis exists.
Statistical stu
Reproductive cells only (Score:5, Interesting)
This is good news but it only applies to reproductive cells. It doesn't include all of the other tissues that were exposed and the increased cancers.
However, based on the data given below, 53,000 and 27,000 are reasonable estimates of the number of excess cancers and cancer deaths that will be attributable to the accident, excluding thyroid cancers. (The 95% confidence levels are 27,000 to 108,000 cancers and 12,000 to 57,000 deaths.) In addition, as of 2005, some 6,000 thyroid cancers and 15 thyroid cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. That number will grow with time.
https://allthingsnuclear.org/l... [allthingsnuclear.org]
The international expert group predicts that among the 600 000 persons receiving more significant exposures (liquidators working in 1986-87, evacuees, and residents of the most “contaminated” areas), the possible increase in cancer mortality due to this radiation exposure might be up to a few percent. This might eventually represent up to four thousand fatal cancers in addition to the approximately 100 000 fatal cancers to be expected due to all other causes in this population.
https://www.who.int/publicatio... [who.int]
Re: Reproductive cells only (Score:5, Insightful)
Attribution is notoriously difficult when the only observable is a "rare" random event roughky approximated by a Poisson process. Telling the difference between lambda and lambda+epsilon when epsilon lambda and you don't even know lambda very precisely is almost a wash.
From personal experience, I was 8 months old and living in Kiev when Chernobyl occurred. Look on the map. It isn't that far. My first kid is fine. My second is still in the oven but so far looks fine. My other family members with kids who are both older and and younger, grew up in same city and further away north and south etc, also have healthy kids. That's a combined N of like 10 between all of us, but still.
Lack of transgenerational effects only (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Hormesis is wishful thinking by nuclear energy apologists and has no scientific evidence to support it.
From UNSCEAR
"Reports by the United States National Research Council and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) argue[15] that there is no evidence for hormesis in humans and in the case of the National Research Council hormesis is outright rejected as a possibility.[16] Therefore, estimating Line
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
As roughly 480k of the first responders, so called regulators, are already dead, and according to Russian scientists about 2million people died to contaminated food: your numbers make no sense.
ah well just as well (Score:1)
Re: Free Energy (Score:2)
It's called the sun. Look it up! ... I mean: Look up! :D
"Exposed" (Score:2)
Again: How much?
The children of those who cleaned up that mess, certainly paid the ultimate price, b never having been born.
And our parents were "exposed" too, being caught in radioactive rain and eating radioactive mushrooms in far away western Europe, without any ill effects on us.
So... Error: Your headline is too broad to be usable.
Nice pro-nuclear propaganda though!
. . . Yeah, everyone can see your nuclear dick is out, America. Ever since Biden.
Sample size? (Score:2)
Considering that:
a) Germany treated around 30,000 children for toroid cancer from Chernobyl
b) the atomic bombs in Japan, each caused around 100,000 Hibakusha, over the course of the next 30 to 50 years - children born with birth defects
A sample size of 139 is absurd.
Re: (Score:3)
Is it? It is established a lot of those thyroid cases are basically confirmation bias.
People were not screened for it properly, and when they start screening for it, surprise a lot of cases show up. It is good that people got treated for conditions they wouldn't otherwise but I doubt those correlation not causation numbers.
Like other people here have said nuclear testing sent vast amounts more radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.ippnw.de/commonFil... [ippnw.de]
https://www.spektrum.de/magazi... [spektrum.de]
That is in germany: 150% increase in thyrodi cancer: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4... [jstor.org]
https://www.ukw.de/nuklearmedi... [www.ukw.de]
https://www.iaea.org/sites/def... [iaea.org]
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de... [deutschlandfunk.de]
Good luck with your ignorance.
Re: (Score:2)
"In Germany, there are no indications for an increased incidence of thyroid cancer in children due to the radiation accident."
BFS is the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection.
b) That one is also incorrect. https://www.rerf.or.jp/uploads... [rerf.or.jp]
Radiation Effects Research Foundation took over from the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and have been studying the impact on survivors and their kids since the bombing. They have not seen a large upti
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry,
are you an complete idiot? The children we treated where Russian and Ukrainina, moron.
Radiation Effects Research Foundation took over from the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and have been studying the impact on survivors and their kids since the bombing. They have not seen a large uptick in birth defects in the area or in the children of survivors conceived after the bombings.
They had into the 1980s about 200,000 cases. You are really a moron.
Damn, no superheroes then. (Score:2)
Anyone remember the Polygon? (Score:1)
456 nuclear bomb tests. ~200,000 people with serious genetic damage.
Kazakhstan's Polygon Legacy: Silent Bombs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]