NHK: Thyroid cancer found in 18 Fukushima children

[FBaggins]

8. There's a reason that it "can't be determined"

Because so far, the rate is no higher than in other Japanese children that were not exposed to the radioiodine from Fukushima.

So if the statistics say that in a given population they should find 15-20 cases of thyroid cancer (absent any nuclear effect) and they find 18... they can't determine whether there are 15 that would have happened anyway and three caused by the accident... or 18 that would have happened anyway and none caused by the accident.

Further complicating things is the fact that everywhere in the world there are far more cases of thyroid cancer than ever get diagnosed. This has been known for many years. The more they look for it (and the finer the instruments they use), the more cases they find. So they can't tell if they're finding more cases because of radiation... or because they're checking so many tens of thoudsands of kids who wouldn't otherwise have been checked. Because nobody was screening for thyroid cancer with high-resolution ultrasound in Japan prior to Fukushima.

It's important to keep in mind that no health physicist expects any identifiable increase in thyroid cancer this early after Fukushima. the studies that are being done now are really just to establish the baseline so that the future impact can be better identified and studied.

When the higher cancer rates hit the West coast

Radiation levels on the West coast from Fukushima are hundreds/thousands of times too low to cause an identifiable increase in cancer rates.

Cesium leaves an accumulative effect for 180 to 300 years

??? What does that mean? In humans, Cesium has a biological half life of about four months. It can't accumulate beyond a certain level absent much higher exposure levels... and 300 years from now essentially all of the Cesium 134 will be long gone and 99.9% of the Cesium 137 will be as well.