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Interesting… My mother was a flight attendant for 35 years and she developed breast cancer later in life. She was told it was probably environmental not genetic
by nielsbot 3y ago
Interesting… My mother was a flight attendant for 35 years and she developed breast cancer later in life. She was told it was probably environmental not genetic based on testing.
You do get additional radiation exposure while flying. Wonder if we should also study the effects of higher radiation exposure in the airline industry.
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://srag.jsc.nasa.gov/spaceradiation/What/What.cfm https://srag.jsc.nasa.gov/spaceradiation/What/What.cfm https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cosmicionizingradiation.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cosmicionizingradia... Sounds like there is enough to evidence to perform a longitudinal cancer study across air transport workers to better understand the potentially increased cancer risk. EDIT: Is hazard pay warranted? Also, perhaps airlines should have to provide estimated cumulative exposure to employees based on their flight trip logs. Estimation should be straightforward based on flight track logs combined with cosmic radiation satellite data.
- klipt 3y agoCan't they just make all employees wear lead vests? I guess the added weight would cost a lot in fuel...
- samus 3y agoUnlike in medical facilities, the radiation comes from multiple directions. Also, the crew moves around the plane. The vests would have to cover an impractically large area. Also, when radiation is blocked by matter, secondary radiation is generated. Since the composition of cosmic radiation is for sure different than the one found in other occupational settings, lead vests might or might not have the same effect. Also, the aluminium skin of the aircraft already has a similar effect. There might not be that much to be done practically. It would be interesting though to let flight crew wear radiation badges.
- sidewndr46 3y agoI'm pretty sure military flight crews already do that, albeit with the idea of measuring exposure in case of nuclear war.
- moffkalast 3y agoProbably makes sense to add HDPE+boron radiation shielding to the entire cabin. Or the simpler one, just don't fly as high.
- fluidcruft 3y agoIf anything they'd do the opposite so that the public doesn't get "the wrong idea" something dangerous is up. Just look at how Homeland Security made it illegal to measure how much radiation the post-9/11 security screening devices put out, forbade medical physicists from testing them, forbade employees working near the scanners from obtaining and wearing their own protection, and fired workers who wore their own dosimetry tags.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago>Homeland Security made it illegal // How do they stop sales of scanning equipment to people who want to do testing? You could easily buy them abroad, and do tests abroad. Also, could you cite the US Code on this please. Thanks.
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoYou could also just leave a dosimeter in your pocket when going through the airport next. There’s a few on the market that log over Bluetooth. Not taken one through the body scanner, I’ve not actually had to go through a body scanner in quite a while at the airport. Just usual metal detector.
- fluidcruft 3y agoI was referring to the security officers who stand next to the machines everyday. They were forbidden from measuring anything related to occupational exposure. At one point the TSA found itself caught in so many lies about their supposed "testing" that they ran a very public PR-style limited study. Coincidentally, nowadays the backscatter scanners have been quietly replaced with millimeter wave scanners. Anyway the point of my comment wasn't to re-litigate this. It's more that the original comment struck me as "can't the fox just guard the henhouse?"
- landemva 3y agoAn officer traditionally has been a person in military with a commission (or NCO), or police. TSA are government employees, with self-created pretend titles and fake badges. TSA can't detain or arrest and if scan tunnel shows possible weapon the TSA aren't allowed to touch it and the line cop does that.
- tenpies 3y agoSince we're on this topic, there also seems to be enough evidence to suggest you should wear sun screen when flying. > Pilots and cabin crew have approximately twice the incidence of melanoma compared with the general population. Further research on mechanisms and optimal occupational protection is needed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482339 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482339 As someone who enjoys looking out the window, I treat it much like going to the beach and re-apply sun screen in longer flights.
- e93849 3y agoGlass will block most UV light, so maybe the melanoma is from the cosmic rays? Not sure if sunscreen helps with that.
- bhk 3y agoSunscreen blocks UV, not cosmic rays, which is the radiation for which jetliner passengers receive an unusually high dose. The glass in the windows probably blocks 75% of UV, and UV exposure is associated with other types of skin cancer, not melanoma (except in cases where one has a history of bad sunburns). In fact, in this review, melanoma is said to be inversely correlated with occupational exposure to UV: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9335442/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9335442/
- gnulinux 3y agoSunscreen doesn't block cosmic rays, those are high energy atomic nucleus (that are normally filtered out by the atmosphere), not high energy photons/light (that end up on beaches). Did you previously find scholarly studies that suggest wearing sunscreen helps with melanoma, or did you just see high melanoma incidence rate in frequent flyers, and assumed sunscreen will help?
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago> Estimation should be straightforward based on flight track logs combined with cosmic radiation satellite data. Just take a cheap dosimeter on your next flight. I have an Atomfast that I often make recordings of exposure with for amusement, as well as using it when looking at neat rocks outside (some areas I like to hike in have surprisingly high radiation levels due to there being some of uranium in the rocks).
- maratc 3y ago> My mother was a flight attendant for 35 years and she developed breast cancer later in life. From what I recall from the Chernobyl studies, the risk of being ill with cancer during the lifetime is 39% for females and 41% for males. The occupational hazards may get the individual risk up a little, but overall cancer is sadly a very frequent occurrence.
- klipt 3y agoKeep in mind lifetime risk includes the risk of getting it in old age, where it might be a case of if you didn't die of cancer, you'd just die of some other ailment (heart attack, dementia, etc) instead. Evolution only optimized our parts to last for so long, and once you get past that age, everything kind of starts failing simultaneously.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoThis is in part because too long life may in fact hurt the group. Of course we don’t want to look at that because we are so hell bent on extending life, even talk about immortality.
- chki 3y agoYou're talking about an optimization strategy that's a few hundred thousand years old though. (And might not even be an optimization strategy at all) Its applicability to modern life seems highly dubious considering the massive cultural changes we have been going through.
- jjk166 3y agoEvolution works on the genetic level, not the population level. While some altruistic strategies might be selected for (e.g. kin selection), in general evolution doesn't care if something "hurts the group." In nature, dying of old age is incredibly rare as you are much more likely to die from predation or injury. Even if you suffered no ill effects from aging, ie you were biologically immortal, passing on your genes successfully would still require you to have offspring reasonably early in life. There is only selection pressure on your genes up to the point where you have successfully passed on your genes. It makes sense for evolution to keep you alive while raising your kids, and even while helping your offspring raise their kids (see the Grandmother Effect [0]), but eventually the marginal utility of your support drops so low, and the odds you're already dead rises so high, that there is simply no selective pressure. As an illustrative example, you could have a gene that makes you twice as strong as you were at 25, but if it only activates after you're 150, you and evolution would never know. On top of this, many genes have tradeoffs. If there is any mutation that gives benefits early in life but is harmful later in life, evolution will tend to select for it, especially versus the reverse. Similarly, traits that only provide a benefit for a finite period which is nevertheless long compared to natural lifespan can be favored over traits that work indefinitely (eg many mammals are born with a few sets of teeth and have no way of repairing them). This leads into more general accumulation-of-damage theories of aging. We see many species in nature, particularly those unlikely to undergo predation and at low risk of injury, with substantially longer or even indefinite lifespans. In the lab, we can also breed organisms like fruit flies to have substantially longer than natural lifespans. There is no evidence that living longer is harmful to others in hunter gatherer societies of the sort we evolved to live in, and certainly no evidence that such harm would still be present in modern, industrial societies. [0] https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/22/grandmother-effect-helps-explain-human-longevity/ https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/22/grandmother-effect-helps...
- psychphysic 3y agoBreast cancer is too common in women to be able to deduce this kind of stuff without a huge amount of data (if ever). There are a few generic factors that are clearly causatively linked, but that doesn't mean we could work out less strong, or rarer links. Whole genome sequencing is becoming more common as is immunological and genetic studies on cancer cells. We might know one day but probably not any time soon.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoYeah, to bad we don't record employment records. Oh well.
- lazide 3y agoIs it because of elevated cosmic ray exposure due to the high altitude? Or plastic in the inflight meals? Or the crazy schedules? Or is there even a statistically significant effect over time? Knowing any of these things is actually quite hard, and would require a lot of detailed data just to identify a potential pattern.
- talldatethrow 3y agoTo add to the data confusion lol, my grandmother basically never left her home farm. Never drank. Ate meat they slaughtered themselves. Sweets were a rare treat on holidays. You could barely get her to take a car trip because it scared her. Other than her no one is aware to have ever had cancer in our families history. Died of breast cancer.
- Supermancho 3y agoThe various US airlines, who partner with health insurance, certainly have access to this data. Cancer frequency, time in-flight, time in stratosphere, etc. Frequency of these things (or a subset) likely affects the rates.
- nielsbot 3y agoThe article jacquesm linked above says in the first paragraph: "Aircrew may be more likely to get skin cancer and female flight attendants may be more likely to get breast cancer than the general population."
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's been done: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cancer.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cancer.html
- aliasxneo 3y agoA quick way to get in a lot of trouble in the US Nuclear Navy was to bring your TLD onboard a flight.
- mh- 3y ago(ThermoLuminescent Dosimeter. Radiation badge thing that indicates with exposure.)
- boringalterego 3y agoSame with the commercial nuclear industry. They don't like you taking them off site most of the time.
- makestuff 3y agoSame thing with all imaging technicians in a hospital. Ex: X-ray, MRI, CT.
- ttymck 3y agoWow, there is a similar comment above[0] suggesting radiation badges for flight crew. I was going to ask if typical badges are sensitive enough to register the expected dose from flight. If I understand correctly, you're saying a single commercial flight is enough to trip the dosimeter? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37178559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37178559
- nekoashide 3y agoNYC-Tokyo over the polar route for a flight crew over an entire year gives you as much as a single full body CT. A single full body CT of radiation every year for that flight crew.
- Gh0stRAT 3y agoNot necessarily, but if it gets xrayed going through security then when they heat it up so that it luminesces, it'll be so bright that it messes up their carefully calibrated detector. This is expensive to fix and the dosimetry people get really mad at you. Source: wore one of these daily for years and would get regular reminders not to bring them on flights or anywhere else they would have to go through an xray machine (eg some federal buildings)
- mint2 3y agoYou do get higher radiation flying - but you are also surrounded by off gasing synthetic materials and receive frequent exposure to engine exhaust and get disrupted sleep due to hours and changing locations. So in other words, there’s a lot of potential causes.