Future of Chernobyl Health Studies in Doubt

[n2doc]

By Declan Butler of Nature magazine

How much radiation is 'unsafe' for humans? For those exposed to fallout from the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the question is all too real. But there is still no good answer: the accident has highlighted the enormous difficulties in estimating the long-term health risks of relatively low doses of radiation.

A group of leading researchers in Europe had hoped that a fresh round of studies on people exposed to radiation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 would finally begin to help fill this yawning science gap (see 'Lessons from the past'). But their proposal is now looking increasingly unlikely to proceed.

The Chernobyl lifespan cohort study was one of the main components of the Agenda for Research on Chernobyl Health (ARCH), which was proposed last year by an international panel of experts who had been charged by the European Commission to advise it on future research needs (see 'Chernobyl's legacy'). The study would track the lifetime health of more than half a million 'liquidators' sent in to clean up the area around Chernobyl, as well as of the general population of the region who were children at the time of the accident. The power of the study would lie in its size, offering more than ten times as many people as the lifetime cohort study set up in Japan after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, which remains the gold standard for studies on the impact of radiation on a population.

Such lifetime cohort studies have never been established for Chernobyl, points out ARCH panel member Dillwyn Williams, a cancer researcher at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, UK, adding that this is probably the last opportunity to set them up. "If ARCH is not supported they probably never will be," he says. The study promises a new way to study long-term health effects - including cancers, but also many other diseases -- following a nuclear accident. Unlike the survivors of the atomic bombs in Japan, the Chernobyl cohorts were exposed to a wide range of radiation doses over a long period of time, making them much more relevant to the Fukushima accident and potentially helping to refine protection levels for radiation workers.

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