Science-informed Policy Making for Protecting People and the Environment from Radiation.

The process to arrive at the radiation protection practices of today to protect workers, patients, and the public, including sensitive populations, has been a long and deliberative one. This paper presents an overview of the US Environmental Protection Agency's (US EPA) responsibility in protecting human health and the environment from unnecessary exposure to radiation. The origins of this responsibility can be traced back to early efforts, a century ago, to protect workers from x rays and radium.

Methodological improvements to meta-analysis of low dose rate studies and derivation of dose and dose-rate effectiveness factors.

Epidemiological studies of cancer rates associated with external and internal exposure to ionizing radiation have been subject to extensive reviews by various scientific bodies. It has long been assumed that radiation-induced cancer risks at low doses or low-dose rates are lower (per unit dose) than those at higher doses and dose rates. Based on a mixture of experimental and epidemiologic evidence the International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended the use of a dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor for purposes of radiological protection to reduce solid cancer risks obtained from moderate-to-high acute dose studies (e.

IMPROVED AGE- AND GENDER-SPECIFIC RADIATION RISK MODELS APPLIED ON COHORTS OF SWEDISH PATIENTS.

Unlabelled: The aim of this study is to implement lifetime attributable risk (LAR) predictions for radiation induced cancers for Swedish cohorts of patients of various age and sex, undergoing diagnostic investigations by nuclear medicine methods.

Methods: Calculations are performed on Swedish groups of patients with Paget's disease and with bone metastases from prostatic cancer and diagnosed with bone scintigraphy with an administration of 500 MBq 99mTc-phosphonate.

Results: The inclusion of patient survival rates into the calculations lowers the induced radiation cancer risk, as it takes into account that cohorts of patients have shorter predicted survival times than the general population.

Lifetime Mortality Risk from Cancer and Circulatory Disease Predicted from the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivor Life Span Study Data Taking Account of Dose Measurement Error.

Dosimetric measurement error is known to potentially bias the magnitude of the dose response, and can also affect the shape of dose response. In this report, generalized relative and absolute rate models are fitted to the latest Japanese atomic bomb survivor solid cancer, leukemia and circulatory disease mortality data (followed from 1950 through 2003), with the latest (DS02R1) dosimetry, using Bayesian techniques to adjust for errors in dose estimates and assessing other model uncertainties. Linear-quadratic models are fitted and used to assess lifetime mortality risks for contemporary UK, USA, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese populations.

Studies of radiation health effects inform EPA actions.

In 1970, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was given the responsibility to provide guidance to other federal agencies in the formulation of radiation protection standards. To carry out its federal guidance responsibilities and protect human health, the EPA must estimate risk at low doses to limit the risk of radiogenic cancers from environmental exposures. These risk estimates are based on models which conform to the linear no threshold (LNT) hypothesis.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency radiogenic risk projections: uncertainty analysis.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has updated its estimates of cancer risks due to low doses of ionizing radiation for the U.

Improved estimates of cancer site-specific risks for A-bomb survivors.

Pawel, D. J., Preston, D.

Uncertainty in estimating probability of causation in a cross-sectional study: joint effects of radiation and hepatitis-C virus on chronic liver disease.

Exposure to other risk factors is an important consideration in assessing the role played by radiation in producing disease. A cross-sectional study of atomic-bomb survivors suggested an interaction between whole-body radiation exposure and chronic hepatitis-C viral (HCV) infection in the etiology of chronic liver disease (chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis), but did not allow determination of the joint-effect mechanism. Different estimates of probability of causation (POC) conditional on HCV status resulted from additive and multiplicative models.