The US Million Person
Nicole Martinez is a Professor at Clemson University in the United States. She is a Certified Health Physicist and a member of the ICRP Main Commission.
Lawrence Dauer is an Attending Physicist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is the Scientific Director of the Million Person Study and a former member of ICRP Committee 3, Radiation Protection in Medicine.
The United States( US) Million Person Study of Low-Dose-Rate Health Effects( MPS) is one of the largest radiation occupational epidemiologic studies. The study is designed to provide robust characterisation of human health risks associated with protracted exposures to ionising radiation at low doses and low dose rates in support of scientific advancement as well as evidence-based policy decisions.
Thus, the MPS is studying over a million healthy US workers and veterans to evaluate cancer and non-cancer mortality and morbidity following low-level exposure, with consideration of rare cancers, radionuclide intake( s), high versus low linear energy transfer( LET), and differences in risks between women and men.
The MPS includes occupational workers who received a broad distribution of cumulative organ doses up to 1 Gy or more, but predominately up to about 300 mGy. Cohorts evaluated to date include workers( including 160,000 women) from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Tennessee Eastman Corporation at Oak Ridge Mound Nuclear Facility, Rocky Flats Plant, above-ground military nuclear weapons test sites, nuclear utilities, industrial radiography, the medical radiation field and others.
Understanding health risks of low dose-rate exposure received over time is challenging in large part due to uncertainties associated with extrapolation from acute and / or high dose exposures or from animal exposures. For example, there is substantial reliance in radiation protection on the Life Span Study( LSS) of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, which is an essential, deeply meaningful study. However, translation of the effects observed in this acutely exposed population to people exposed to lower doses over longer periods of time in different countries requires assumptions that introduce large uncertainties in risk estimates.
Calutron operators, Oak Ridge
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