‘Big Bang Time Again’ ?
Can anyone be unaware of the humanitarian consequences of the two atomic bombs.
This is not a PC protest, or a prompt to relight the endless debate about the morality of the two attacks. Let us remember, though, that many thousands of non-combatants perished, most of them in great suffering, and avoid gleeful and flippant references to these events.
I’m not taking a nuke ’em or PC stance here, merely offering an interesting article in today’s “Sydney Morning Herald” for all to read …
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Life goes on and on for atomic bomb survivors
By John von Radowitz in London
August 5, 2005
Forty-five per cent of people who survived being blasted with radiation from the atom bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War are still alive, it has been reported.
They are now the subject of the largest investigation ever carried out on the long-term effects of radiation exposure.
There still remain many unanswered questions about the impact of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago, New Scientist magazine reports.
A review published last spring by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, based in Japan, concluded: “We still have no clear answers as to how the A-bomb radiation has caused biological effects in humans.”
With 150 researchers in the two cities and funding from the US and Japanese governments, the foundation has been closely following the health of survivors and their children since the 1950s.
The horrors of “atom bomb disease” were first described in The Lancet medical journal in 1946.
The first symptoms were anorexia, nausea and vomiting, followed by a failure of the bone marrow to make blood cells efficiently, and death.
Exposure to the radiation increased the long-term risk of cancer, and for tumours affecting the stomach, colon, lung and breast the risk lasted a lifetime.
Studies have also shown that children exposed to radiation while in the womb grow up smaller and less intelligent than their peers. Yet many survivors appear to have withstood the effects of radiation.
More than 150,000 people are thought to have died when the bombs fell on the Japanese cities on August 6, 1945.
But of the 280,000 or so survivors hit by radiation, 45 per cent are still alive, New Scientist says.
Leukaemia is commonly thought to be one of the main legacies of the bomb.
But new research suggests that only a small portion of the population might have been at risk of developing leukaemia after the bombs were dropped.
Doubts have also been raised over claims that radiation exposure increased the risk of diseases other than cancer, such as chronic liver disease.
The idea that genetic abnormalities in people affected by radiation are passed on to offspring appears to be a myth.
Research on 22,000 children, half of whom had a parent within two kilometres of the bombs’ “ground zero”, suggest they do not have unusually high rates of disease.
But New Scientist reports it is too soon to assume the children were in the clear. “Their average age is still just 48 – too young for most cancers to appear.”
Thousands of peace activists marched through the city centre of Hiroshima to the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs yesterday, calling for a global ban on nuclear weapons.
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