Unexpected Post-Fukushima Health Woes: Depression, Obesity

By Judy Foreman
Guest Contributor




VOA Photo S. Herman/wikimedia commons

VOA Photo S. Herman/wikimedia commons






A Pediatrician Remembers Fukushima’s Children And The Risks Of Radiation

By Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

It has been six months since a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Radiation fall-out from the disaster continues to be a significant health problem for the people of Fukushima and the dangers will in all likelihood continue for years to
come. As a pediatrician, I’ve been wondering recently, who will care for the children of Fukushima?

Children are at greater risk of the dangers of radiation for many reasons. Their minute volumes, or the amount of air they breathe in one minute, are greater than adults, causing them greater exposure to radioactive gases. They also live and breathe closer to the ground and therefore closer to nuclear fallout as it settles to earth. Radioactive Iodine is readily transmitted to human breast milk. (Cesium has been detected in the breast milk of seven women in the Fukushima area.) Cow’s milk also becomes quickly contaminated when radioactive materials settle onto grazing fields. Continue reading

Overuse of Chest CT Scans: The Massachusetts Story

Double scanning CT patients: Beth Israel Hospital in Needham is nearly three times the national average, according to The Times

A big investigation in The New York Times over the weekend documents the outrageous overuse of CT scans by medical providers. The report found that “hundreds of hospitals across the country needlessly exposed patients to radiation by scanning their chests twice on the same day, according to federal records and interviews with researchers.”

The excellent interactive map accompanying the story allows you to search by state to see whether your favorite hospital is double scanning. In Massachusetts, according to the The Times map, most of the hospitals are well below the national average for double scanning, which is 5.4%. That is all but one: in 2008, at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham, 16% of chest CT scan patients (203 patients in total) were scanned twice in the same day.

Radioactive Spinach? So Far, Even Popeye’s Risk Is Pretty Low

Crunching the numbers on radiation-tainted spinach, an expert finds that so far, the health risk is slim

When disaster strikes, it’s difficult to keep perspective.

For instance, I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge when the second plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. Now, no matter how often I come across statistics about flying being safer than driving, there’s a part of me, deep down, that doesn’t really believe it.

Still, it’s helpful to remain rational. So hat’s off to NPR’s Richard Knox for doing the math and offering a reality check after some dire warnings from the World Health Organization about food contaminated by radiation emitted from the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant in Japan.

Here’s Knox’s bottom line assessment, based on an interview with Peter Caracappa, a health physicist at Renssealaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. who has been calculating various radiation risks on specific foods, such as milk, spinach and drinking water: “…the risk of ingesting even the most highly contaminated Japanese foodstuffs reported so far is very, very small.”

“The long and the short of it is that we’re not going to be able to detect any statistically significant change in the cancer rate for anyone as a result of the events in Japan,” Caracappa told Shots.

The Spinach Risk:

Caracappa figures someone would need to eat 41 pounds of that Hitachi spinach to reach the nuclear power plant worker’s annual exposure limit. “That’s a significant amount of spinach,” he allows.

But what about cancer? That’s probably what most people worry about when they hear about radioactivity in food. Well, it takes 20 million becquerels to yield a Sievert’s worth of exposure; remember, that’s what it takes to increase a lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent.


The Milk Risk:


To reach the radiation dose limit for a power plant worker, you’d need to drink 2,922 eight-ounce glasses of milk. To raise your lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent, you’d have to drain more than 58,000 glasses of milk. That would take you 160 years, if you drank one 8-ounce glass a day.

Brigham Expert: Why Not To Buy Iodine Pills

Children in Kawamata, Japan, take potassium iodide
















