Reduce Cancer Deaths 20-30x by Radiation Hormesis

(Condensed from the original.)

In 1983, a group of apartment buildings was completed in Taipei City, Taiwan. Construction used recycled steel contaminated with radioactive cobalt-60.

These buildings were occupied by some 10,000 people with estimated radiation doses of 40 millisieverts per year, mSv/y.  (Americans receive about 3.3 mSv/year in natural background radiation.)  The results in the graph show cancer mortality for these apartment dwellers compared with the general population in Taiwan.

Cancer death rate for people living in these apartments steadily decreased until it was essentially zero. Deaths from cancer averaged 3.5 per 100,000 person years for the irradiated population, as compared with 116 per 100,000 person years for the general population - an apparent 33-fold suppression of cancer deaths.

These results were published as “Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?” in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, pp 6-10.

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The linear no-threshold hypothesis of radiation damage to living things claims that any amount of irradiation is dangerous to good health.  There are an estimated 2,000 research publications on the subject of radiation hormesis. This body of literature disproves that no-threshold hypothesis.  Hormesis is likely to be the greatest medical advance of the century.

Based on the best experiment to date, human cancer deaths can be reduced 20- to 30-fold by increasing whole-body radiation.  Cobalt-60 is a good choice, since its half-life of 5.3 years is long enough to be useful, yet short enough to conveniently remove it with time. It could be utilized in bedrooms, for example, providing good control over the dose.

There is nothing in the realm of cancer prevention that has ever shown a potential benefit remotely comparable to ionizing radiation. Chemical hormesis and diet restriction, about which much less is known, will probably turn out to be the closest rivals.

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ACCESS TO ENERGY
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MAY 2011 (Vol. 38 no. 10)   

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