Atomic bombs did not have rampant effects on survivors, review finds
THEY killed more than 200 000 people, destroyed two cities and shocked the world.
But the long-ter m health effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs have not been as severe as feared, according to a review of more than 100 studies spanning more than 60 years.
The initial death count was “horrendous”, but concerns that survivors and their children would be blighted by ill health have been largely unfounded, the review concludes.
The US dropped the world’s first atomic bombs on Japan.
On August 6, 1945, the uranium bomb “Little Boy” devastated the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” exploded over Nagasaki, compelling the Japanese to surrender and ending World War II.
An estimated 146 000 people in Hiroshima and 80 000 in Nagasaki died in the bombings and their immediate aftermath.
It has long been assumed survivors were doomed to develop cancer and other illnesses.
But the findings of a continuing American and Japanese research project – involving 100 000 survivors, 77 000 of their children and 20 000 residents who were not in the cities at the time of the bombings – tell a different story.
Report author Bertrand Jordan, a French molecular biologist and nuclear physicist, says the research data shows while cancer rates are higher than normal among them, most survivors have not developed the disease.
Survivors were 10 percent more likely to develop “solid” cancers, such as of the breast and prostate. The radiation led to a bigger increase in the chances of developing leukaemia, but the disease is much rarer.
Among those exposed to high doses of radiation, lifespan was cut by just over a year. Average lifespan was “reduced by only a few months”.
By contrast, the social and economic chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union reduced average life expectancy by five years in Russia in the early 1990s.
The medical research also shows babies born from 1946 on grew into healthy adults.
Those exposed to radiation in the womb were stunted and had brain damage.
Writing in the journal Genetics, Dr Jordan, of Marseille University, emphasises that his results should not be used to play down the threat of nuclear war. – Daily Mail