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Sunday, November 6, 2011

RIBs & BEIR P5

(P1 of this series can be found here)

We've hardly mentioned BEIR VII throughout all of this.

Remember this graph from yesterday?

Well, here it is again within BEIR VII.

It's there because BEIR VII is making the point that the LSS is our best source of epidemiology.  That's an LNT graph on steroids (ooopps, steroids can cause cancer too!).

BEIR VII covers all the other facets I've covered in this series but in mega-detail (except radon which shows LNT and of course, and Fukushima which hadn't happened yet).

The best epidemiological study on the planet points to LNT, and continues to improve with time.

BEIR VII is locked in by the evidence, not ideology to:

"CONCLUSION

The committee concludes that current scientific evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a linear, no-threshold dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of cancer in humans."

But they do more than conclude the obvious.  They take the Japanese cancer risk estimates and "map" them to the U.S. population.  They actually do epidemiology.  Formally, this is called "transfers between dissimilar populations".  This is necessary because the baseline risks of various cancers can differ based on smoking, diet, genetics, etc. between different populations.

But they only do this at 0.1 Gy and calculate an overall risk of all cancers of 1% for the U.S. population (ie., from a backgournd of 42 to an increase of 43 cancers in a population of 100 people). 

BEIR V (1990) did the same sort of thing and they calculated an overall risk of all cancers of .08% for the U.S. population.

The risk of cancer has increased and will continue to increase as the epidemiology of the LSS improves with time.

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