Biology Newsfeed

Researchers Say Fukushima Child Cancer Rates 20-50x Higher Than Expected

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: October 9th, 2015, 10:00pm UTC

New submitter JackSpratts writes: According to the Associated Press, "A new study says children living near the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a rate 20 to 50 times that of children elsewhere, a difference the authors contend undermines the government's position that more cases have been discovered in the area only because of stringent monitoring. Most of the 370,000 children in Fukushima prefecture (state) have been given ultrasound checkups since the March 2011 meltdowns at the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The most recent statistics, released in August, show that thyroid cancer is suspected or confirmed in 137 of those children, a number that rose by 25 from a year earlier. Elsewhere, the disease occurs in only about one or two of every million children per year by some estimates."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Researchers+Say+Fukushima+Child+Cancer+Rates+20-50x+Higher+Than+Expected%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1LbpuPW"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F10%2F09%2F1835245%2Fresearchers-say-fukushima-child-cancer-rates-20-50x-higher-than-expected%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/09/1835245/researchers-say-fukushima-child-cancer-rates-20-50x-higher-than-expected?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/09/1835245/researchers-say-fukushima-child-cancer-rates-20-50x-higher-than-expected?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/-rJ6aBh-3hY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

Read more

Return to the Newsfeed