Background: The earlier Atomic Bomb explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and three worth mentioning nuclear accidents - detonation at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Chernobyl nuclear fallout and an accident at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant have made us more worried about the secure exploitation of nuclear energy. The central focus of this paper is to review radiation-mediated health e...

Radioactive waste management is an important component of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident mitigation and remediation activities in the so-called Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. This article describes the localization and characteristics of the radioactive waste present in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and summarizes the pathways and strategy for handling the radioactive waste-related proble...

We examined the use of the mouse Pc-3 ESTR (expanded simple tandem repeat) locus and 72 human microsatellite loci as potentially sensitive biomarkers for mutagenic exposures to germ cells in mice and humans respectively. In the mouse work, we treated male mice with TCDD (2, 3, 7, 8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin; a chemical known to induce congenital anomalies in humans and mice) and, analysed the...

This article traces disagreements about the genetic effects of low-dose radiation exposure as waged by James Neel (1915-2000), a central figure in radiation studies of Japanese populations after World War II, and Yuri Dubrova (1955-), who analyzed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In a 1996 article in Nature, Dubrova reported a statistically significant increase in the minisatell...

The accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine in 1986 led to a substantial increase of thyroid cancer among those exposed as children. The other cancer that is the most sensitive to the effects of ionizing radiation is leukemia, and this paper evaluates the evidence relating exposure to Chernobyl radioactivity and leukemia risk. Two types of objectives are identified, namely, sci...

It has been known for 50 years that thyroid exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation in childhood and adolescence induces an appreciable cancer risk. Epidemiological studies in children treated with external radiotherapy for benign or malignant lesions in the head and neck have also shown the induction of thyroid cancer. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that the risk for dev...

Heterotrimenc G proteins participate in the signal transduction ens cade. Adult thyroid tumors have been shown to harbor specific point mutations in codons 201 and 227 of the G@asubunit of the adenylate cyclase stimulator. This protein affects the GDP/GTP turnover and finally results in an enhanced activation of G@and thus adenylate cyclase. We attempted to find out if G@agene mutations were pr...

OBJECTIVE This study assessed the long-term mental health effects of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. METHOD Two population samples (N = 3,044), one from the Gomel region, close to the accident site, and one from Tver, 500 miles away, were studied 6 1/2 years after the event with the use of a variety of self-report questionnaires and a standardized psychiatric interview. RESULTS The preva...

BACKGROUND After the Chernobyl nuclear incident in 1986, children in the Narodichesky region, located 80 km west of the Chernobyl Power Plant, were exposed to 137Cesium (137Cs). Little is known about the effects of chronic low-level radiation on humoral immune responses in children residing in contaminated areas. METHODS In four different approaches we investigated the effect of residential 1...

This paper aims to determine the thyroid volumes in children and teenagers living in Gomel and Mogilev Oblasts, which are the areas of Belarus that were most affected by the Chernobyl accident. Results of thyroid volume measurements performed in 1991-1996 by the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation were used to evaluate the variation by age of the thyroid volumes for girls and boys aged from 5 t...