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Well, the radiation exposure was enough to kill several of those workers outright, and the rest had hugely elevated rates of cancer. In one instance the pregna

Well, the radiation exposure was enough to kill several of those workers outright, and the rest had hugely elevated rates of cancer. In one instance the pregnant wife of one worker spent too much time with him and the radiation emanating from his body was enough to give her a miscarriage. And yet the article makes a very strong claim: all that radiation didn’t cause any rise in birth defects at all! That’s surprising. It certainly caused defects in the animals in the area, who didn’t have the insanely high exposure as the workers- albeit the workers were exposed for a shorter time. So something is going on here which I freely admit I don’t completely understand. I just thought of another possibility: all the workers who suffered that exposure were men. Perhaps, radiation on a developing fetus is mutagenic, but radiation exposure in sperm is less so, maybe the sperm that develop after the acute exposure is gone are normal!

maratc 6y ago
> the radiation exposure was enough to kill several of those workers outright I gather no wildlife took part in putting the fires off. > the pregnant wife of one worker spent too much time with him and the radiation emanating from his body was enough to give her a miscarriage. Did you see that in the HBO Miniseries? "Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room. First, as discussed, none of the victims were radioactive—their exposures were almost exclusively external, not internal. More importantly, risk to a fetus from an exposure like this is infinitesimally small." [1] [1] https://cancerletter.com/filmtv/20190524_3/ https://cancerletter.com/filmtv/20190524_3/