If radiation is so dreaded as an agent spreading cancer, why is it used to cure cancer?
Because rapidly multiplying cells are more sensitive to radiation whether in growing children or in malignancies
¾and these cells are killed more quickly than healthy tissue. However, some of the surrounding healthy cells are killed or damaged also. Killing them does not matter, since the body replaces them quickly, but damage may cause the DNA strands, which program the construc-tion of further cells, to go haywire. Cancer means the rapid growth of cells due to such a faulty program.The reason why this does not happen to the healthy cells is that they have a very efficient repair mechanism: when a DNA strand (complex molecule) or program is broken, the cell uses an un-damaged strand as a template with which to rebuild the damaged strand to standard length, and does so within minutes. Cancerous cells, to the contrary, keep on rebuilding crazy cells with a program that has gone out of control, and radiation treatment means killing all of the cancerous cells plus some healthy cells while relying on the repair mechanism of the healthy cells to rebuild any damage.
But Prof. Fremlin gives reasons why he thinks this is not the mechanism that is responsible for hormesis. The agent, he proposes, is the immune system, which detects and destroys cells that have been invaded by foreign bodies such as a virus. The repair mechanism is a marvel, fast and highly efficient; yet it is only a slave mechanism without adaptability or "intelligence." The im-mune system, by comparison, has two higher properties: memory and learning ability. That is how it can defeat a previously un-known virus or germ and why it can very easily defeat a second attack by the same type of foreign body
¾that is the essence of protective inoculation, though of course its discoverers had no idea of why it worked.But, suggested Fremlin in 1985, the immune system can do more than that: when it is stimulated by one type of invader, it will mar-shal its forces not only against that type of attacker, but it will im-prove its overall vigilance against a wider class of assaults
¾ perhaps something like the US, stimulated by an event as insig-nificant as the taking of 50 hostages in Iran, woke up (for a very short while) from its lethargy and improved its defenses against far more serious threats than those by a crazy Koran puncher. Specifi-cally, low radiation doses would stimulate the immune system into a general improvement not limited to the immediate attack.One year later support for this hypothesis came from different quarters: a 1986 study found that deaths from malignant diseases in Britain were less common among children who had been inocu-lated against any of eight diseases than among children who had been inoculated against none of them. Thus a child inoculated against diphtheria had a better chance of surviving measles, even if it had not been inoculated against the latter. Naturally, as in all such cases, this is consistent with the hypothesis, but does not prove it.
The large body of data collected by Prof. B.L. Cohen on radon and cancer incidence refutes the linear hypothesis and shows that hormesis works even for the high-energy alpha particles of the radon daughters: low level exposure to radon improves health.
Prof Fremlin has noted the same in Cornwall (SW tip of England): it has more radon and less cancer. Fremlin has now also analyzed the data of the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, recently supplied by Soviet authorities to the IAEA [AtE Aug 89].
Although 32 years is too short to draw any conclusions on lon-gevity, the fact that there was no increase in mortality or morbidity rates (compared with two control groups of unexposed population) leads Fremlin to the conclusion that there is no excess mortality for maximum dose equivalents of 52 rem. This is consistent with the Hiroshima-Nagasaki data.
That is good news for the Californians who donned gas masks after Chernobyl. Their exposure was well under ten million times that level, so that, tragically, they survived.
[Sources: J. Fremlin, "Radiation hormesis," The Atom (London), Apr. 1989 and private communications from Prof. Fremlin.]
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Vol. 17, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 17, No. 4 Date: December 01, 2004 03:25 PM Title: No more threats to energy security?
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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