Health Risks of Ionizing Radiation: - Clark University

Appendix B 182
through dense, vocabulary-heavy text.
B.2 External Radiation and Thyroid Cancer
External exposures to radiation that have been associated
with thyroid cancer include the atomic
bomb, medical exposures, and exposures during the
cleanup of Chernobyl. The atomic bomb survivors,
with a mean whole-body dose of 0.264 Sv (26.4
rem) showed a clear increase in thyroid cancer. The
dose-response relationship has been described as
linear (Thompson et al. 1994) and there is no evidence
for a low-dose threshold (Little and Muirhead
1997). The dose-response relationship for the entire
cohort was described with an Excess Relative Risk
(ERR) of 1.2/Sv (0.48-2.1) (Thompson et al. 1994).
The highest risk among A-bomb survivors has been
seen in children. The ERR broken into different age
groups clearly shows this: for children age 0-10 at
the time of the bombing the value was 9.46/Sv and
for children age 10-20 the value was 3.02/Sv. The
dose coefficient in adults, an ERR of 0.10/Sv (