In the zero to 5 year group, girls are twice as likely to develop cancer at some point in their lives if exposed to ionizing (atomic) radiation, than are boys. Adult women are also less resistant than adult men -- adult females are 50% more likely to get cancer (not only breast cancer) than adult males.
Nuclear meltdowns have a beginning, but in the frame of human history there will be no "end" to Fukushima, Chernobyl or the other major radiological catastrophes our species has created to date...At Fukushima +2 very important NEWS about disproportionate harm from radiation is offered here. Gender matters (a lot) in the Atomic Age.
If a flu epidemic were to selectively target men for fatalities over women, this would be big news; if a government sponsored vaccine against this flu selectively protected women more than men, I think that would trigger a pretty big firestorm of discussion, if not action.
It was with some puzzlement that I was faced, twenty years into my job at Nuclear Information and Resource Service (www.nirs.org), occasional questions coming from women asking about radiation impacting women more than men. I asked back, "You mean pregnant women, right? In which case we are talking about the fetus..." To my amazement, came the reply, "No, women, not pregnant women." I was startled, but no, I did not know anything about that. These few women could not give me a source for where they had heard this idea. I was left with a niggle in my stomach, but I maintained my part of the ignorance and silence on this revolutionary news: gender matters when it comes to the Atomic Age.
It was not until 2011 and the triple meltdown at Fukushima, when the Executive Director of NIRS, Michael Mariotte asked me to write a letter on women and breast cancer in post-Fukushima Japan to the founder of the Komen for a Cure Foundation that I realized I had to track down my ignorance.
It is true that Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) had started a campaign in 2005 on disproportionate impact of radiation--but my understanding from a quick look at a couple of emails with the name "Healthy from the Start," was that this was focused on children. We have long known that due to body mass and rate of cell division in somatic growth children are more vulnerable to radiation impact. I had missed IEER's "memo" that it is girls in particular, and women too.
In 2011 as Fukushima was melting I was pretty determined to figure this out; it felt like a moral obligation to find out something as big as a gender difference in radiation impacts in honor of the horrendous suffering in Japan. So I looked. At first I found nothing. I decided to call one of the last remaining icons of the 20th Century radiation research pioneers--Dr. Rosalie Bertell.
Rosalie told me to look at a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report that ended up being out of print. I called her back when I could not get access to that report. Rosalie said "look at the NAS BEIR VII; only it is not in the text, you will have to look at their numbers. You will find the difference there."
BEIR VII (the seventh report in a series called the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) published in 2006 by the National Academy of Science (NAS) --is on the one hand considered "the gold standard" on radiation by some, and by others a highly a controversial document. The nuclear industry hates it--the report affirms that there is no safe dose of radiation. My coworker Diane D'Arrigo and a cohort of anti-nuclear activists also hate it since it leaves out so much: there is nothing directly based on Chernobyl data and it employs so many "fudge factors" that they point out how many ways it functions as a "front" for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep saying some exposure to radiation is ok. It felt almost sacrilegious to spend many hours investigating the numbers published in that report, but I did.
To my amazement, Rosalie and the women who came out to my talks were right. The numbers presented in BEIR VII show radiation is more harmful to women. The difference is not small. For every two adult men who get cancer, roughly three adult women will get cancer at the same level of exposure; the ratio holds for fatal cancer too. IEER is also right: little girls are the most vulnerable. Girls exposed when 0--5 years are twice as likely to get cancer at some point at their lives compared to comparable exposures and aged little boys. Twice, according to NAS numbers.
Why, in 20 years as a professional in this field did I not know this? Why, two years after Fukushima and 14 months after I published a briefing paper (http://www.nirs.org/...) in October, 2011 and then toured the federal agencies to deliver the findings, is this still news?
Stunningly, the authors of BEIR VII are mute on this subject. I need to interview them; did this group of scientists miss the gender difference in their own numbers? Were they unwilling to discuss it because there is (not yet) an explanation of causation? Were there women involved?
We cannot attribute the full difference between the genders to body mass or rate of cell division. Comparing the 0-5 years group, the boy and girls in that age group are about the same size (if anything girls are bigger) and ostensibly growing at roughly the same rate. Again, adult women compared to adult men may be somewhat smaller as a group, but that likely does not explain a 50% difference.
What also cannot be explained are federal regulators in possession of the same data who persist in setting radiation standards based on the effects of radiation on adult men. Some men get sick from radiation; some men die from cancer caused by radiation, but as a group, being more resistant to harm than all other parts of the life cycle means that they should be on a lower tier of consideration when it comes to radiation and protection.
Women and children may be characterized as "more vulnerable"--but this implies that there is something wrong with us. There is nothing wrong with us. Dumping ionizing radioactivity into our air, our water, our food, and our bodies will result in harm. Doing so intentionally should be a criminal act. Since our bodies are less resistant, and the regulators are not factoring us, radiation harm is being under reported. The World Health Organization on February 28 released a flawed report based on even more flawed data on possible health consequences from the contamination of the Fukushima Prefecture by the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. The report does break ground in acknowledging a significantly greater risk for females developing thyroid cancer if exposed as infants, and also higher incidence of solid tumors in females of all age groups.
Having this information about disproportionate impact of radiation in hand has become incumbent upon me, and NIRS to share it. Women have a right to know; parents have a right to know; husbands, fathers, sons and brothers need to know. To put this bluntly: I am talking about all girls, all women, worldwide; and all ionizing radiation: natural, medical, commercial and military atomic industries, waste; you name it.
New initiatives to release radioactive waste into commerce as if it were not radioactive will, if allowed to go forward, expand the number of people randomly and indiscriminately exposed to ionizing radiation (with no individual benefit whatsoever on a daily basis). We know; and BEIR VII and many other studies affirm that there is no safe dose of radiation. We must stand up to protect ALL of us. There is no safe dose--so there should be no increase over natural radiation levels. Zero.
The National Geographic Daily News in 2011 reported that there have been millions fewer girl children born than would have been expected since the mid-1960s and posits that this may be due to radiation from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and large nuclear reactor accidents. One of these years we will also admit that a big portion of the cancer epidemic comes from these radiation sources.
As the research as to why risk of radiation harm is tied to gender continues, we must not only stand, but rise. We need a healthy future together. It is time to base all policies in the public sector on the simple (and sane) assumption that the most vulnerable is the one exposed.
Olson spoke as part of the March 11 + 12, 2013 at a Symposium hosted by Dr. Helen Caldicott:
The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, March 11 and 12 at the New York Academy of Medicine, New York City, NY. Her talk, and many more will be archived at: http://www.totalwebcasting.com/... the program for the event is here: http://www.nuclearfreeplanet.org/...
Sources cited:
NIRS Briefing Paper, fact sheet, graphic information and short videos by Ian Goddard are posted here: http://www.nirs.org/...
IEER Healthy from the start campaign: http://ieer.org/...
Release of radioactive metals into commerce: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/...
National Geographic report: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...