Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Child Leukemia Doubles Near French Nuclear Power Plants, French Researchers Say

From Reuters (1/11/2012):

Jan 11 (Reuters) - The incidence of leukaemia is twice as high in children living close to French nuclear power plants as in those living elsewhere in the country, a study by French health and nuclear safety experts has found.

But the study, to be published soon in the International Journal of Cancer, fell short of establishing a causal link between the higher incidence of leukaemia, a type of blood cancer, and living near nuclear power plants.

France has used nuclear power for three decades and is the most nuclear-reliant country in the world, with 75 percent of its electricity produced by 58 reactors.

The study, conducted by the French health research body INSERM, found that between 2002 and 2007, 14 children under the age of 15 living in a 5-kilometre radius of France's 19 nuclear power plants had been diagnosed with leukaemia.

This is double the rate of the rest of the country, where a total of 2,753 cases were diagnosed in the same period.

"This is a result which has been checked thoroughly and which is statistically significant," said Dominique Laurier, head of the epidemiology research laboratory at France's nuclear safety research body (IRSN).

INSERM has carried out similar research with the IRSN since 1990, but has never before found a higher incidence of leukaemia in children living near nuclear power plants.

"But we are working on numbers which are very small and results have to be analysed with a lot of care," said Laurier, one of the authors of the study.

Laurier said the findings indicated no difference in risk between sites located by the sea or by rivers, nor according to the power capacity of the plant.

The IRSN said it recommended a more thorough study of the causes of the leukaemia cases found near nuclear power stations and hoped to set up international research collaboration.

"It's a rare disease and working on a bigger scale would allow more stable results," said Laurier.

A 35-year British study published last year found no evidence that young children living near nuclear power plants had an increased risk of developing leukaemia.

The research, conducted by scientists on the Committee of the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE), found only 20 cases of childhood leukaemia within 5 km (3.1 miles) of nuclear power stations between 1969 and 2004.

The scientists said the rate was virtually the same as in areas where there were no nuclear plants.

Studies have been conducted around the world into possible links between the risk of childhood blood cancers and living near nuclear plants.

A study on Germany, published in 2007, did find a significantly increased risk, but the COMARE team said these findings were probably influenced by an unexplained leukaemia cluster near a nuclear plant in Krummel, north Germany, that lasted from 1990 to 2005.

Excluding Krummel, evidence for an increased leukaemia risk among young children living close to German nuclear power plants was "extremely weak", it said.

(Reporting By Muriel Boselli, Editing by Alexandria Sage and Tim Pearce)

4 comments:

doitujin said...

i guess that's not necessarily news to english readers (?) (i read about some german study with similar results, too. can't remember the details anymore, though), but did you ever post this to your japanese blog in any form?
it could maybe refute what so many japanese seem to think about low level radiation.

farfromhome said...

Science with a Skew: The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and Fukushima
http://japanfocus.org/-Gayle-Greene/3672

Wow......

Mankind is so very doomed.

Anonymous said...

“Bible arithmetic!” Stewart called the Hiroshima data

and from that same era, "Work Makes Us Free"


“The effects of radiation do not come to people that are happy and laughing.” says Dr. Shunichi

Yes, of course.

Nice page, Gayle Greene.

Anonymous said...

Yes, Shunichi, and the IAEA no longer feels low level radiation ionises anymore.


"INPO appears to be lead in coordinating for US nuc industry "

http://enenews.com/japan-reports-5-persons-received-lethal-radiation-doses-first-5-days-fukushima-crisis

"The results of INPO plant evaluations are not shared with the public, and any related information shared within the nuclear industry does not typically include the name of the plant. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Nuclear_Power_Operations


on an aside,
Suppression of the Media, or looting run amok ?

"It was Bloomberg itself that was the the first in the MSM to acknowledge and even mention the scale of the uprising against EU corruption and criminality (though they didn't mention that, apart from the lies the former Government had been telling) a few years ago (this was an uprising I witnessed myself). They did this a few days ago, admitting it was the biggest public uprising in Hungary, since 1956 (and boy, it was indeed big, I have never seen anything else like it in my life) and no media coverage of those events is allowed to this day, in Europe, or was even allowed in Hungary itself (which should be telling you all you need to know about the EU). I witnessed the complete absence of coverage in Hungary myself, while I was there during the uprising. "

A few years ago and the first I've heard of it.
No coverage allowed.
That same era.

http://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?post=200382

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