Hiroshima and Nagasaki Still Dealing With Fallout

The unborn children of those living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the U.S. dropped the bomb during WWII are still dealing with issues of the fallout. Adult cancers are now attacking children and those yet to be born when their city was forever changed.

Findings of a recent study have been published in the March 19 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“Clearly there’s an increased risk for adult cancer among all those exposed to radiation, but risk following exposure in utero [in the womb] seems to be quite a bit smaller than risk among those exposed as young children,” said study author Dale Preston, a principal scientist with the Hirosoft International Corp., a California-based consulting and software development company.

The study Preston conducted was in association with other researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute and scientists from the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

RERF, called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in the their beginnings, have been studying the more than 120,000 survivors for decades. Cancer rates aren’t available from 1945 to 1957 so this study focused on survivors between the ages of 12 and 55 between 1958 and 1999. Almost 2,500 had yet to be born when the bombs dropped, still in their mothers wombs and 15,500 were under the age of six at the time. The study focused on the radiation dosage exposures and how close the child or pregnant mother were to the epicenters of the two explosions.

During the study 336 men and 407 women had developed cancer. Diagnosis rates increased dramatically after the age of 40. 70 percent of the man and 30 percent of the women had incidents of digestive system cancers. Breast cancer and cancer of the reproductive system accounted for 58% of the disease within the women.

Researchers determined that nine of the cancers within those who were in their mother’s womb during the blast were directly caused by the radiation exposure from the atomic bombs dropped. That is in comparison to the 87 cases that the blast caused with the adult who had been children during the blast.

“This is a subject of much interest, and these studies are ongoing,” Preston said. “And in another five or six years the number of cancer cases among survivors will probably double, because these people are relatively young — in their 50s — and cancer rates go up in general with age. And I think — if the trends we found continue as expected — that we will see that the risk differences between childhood and in utero exposure will grow wider.”

The study showed that embryos had a better protection while still in the womb than others during this atomic incident. Why is still not completely clear. Does the embryo have a better DNA repair process while still in development? Does an embryo simply discard the damaged cells that radiation could cause? Or is it because a mother’s body starts protecting her young before they even hold their child the first time?

Another possibility,” Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University School of Medicine offered, “would be that there’s enough maternal wall to offer a small amount of shielding around the placenta — though I would think this is less likely because this kind of radiation pretty much penetrates body tissue without a problem. So perhaps it could also be that cancerous tumors were not produced at the instant of the bomb explosion but later, and that the mother’s placental barrier perhaps protected the unborn baby from exposure. But all this is all just theorizing because we don’t really know.”