[HN Gopher] The children of atomic bomb survivors: A genetic study
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       The children of atomic bomb survivors: A genetic study
        
       Author : bryanrasmussen
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2022-06-04 16:19 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
        
       | NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
       | So, there you go it seems having full fledged nuclear war is
       | quite safe. :) (sorry for dark humor)
        
         | acidburnNSA wrote:
         | If you stay completely inside for the first 2 weeks you'll
         | probably be ok, radiation wise. If you're unsheltered in the
         | first hours in fallout you will get a fatal dose in a matter of
         | minutes and die a painful death over the next few days. So if
         | you see the blast and survive the pressure wave then get the
         | hell inside and stay there for 2 weeks no matter where you are.
         | Try not to ventilate too much.
         | 
         | https://www.oism.org/nwss/
        
           | speed_spread wrote:
           | In the words of South Park: "Duck And Cover!"
        
       | mjreacher wrote:
       | In case it hadn't been noticed to some readers, this is actually
       | a book and clicking on the "Contents" button reveals a table of
       | contents.
        
         | podiki wrote:
         | Good spot. This is more of a special issue or collection,
         | reprinting previous research (not sure if previously
         | unpublished is also included) under this theme.
        
         | ridgeguy wrote:
         | Entire book available for free download at:
         | 
         | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234265/
         | 
         | under "Views", right-hand column.
        
       | nonrandomstring wrote:
       | While in airforce service my father was briefly stationed in the
       | South Pacific for "the tests". I wish I'd asked him more while he
       | was alive. AFAIK he was one of the lucky ones, a _long_ way
       | upwind. He 's the only person who ever told me about seeing a
       | mushroom cloud eating up the horizon. I have sometimes worried if
       | I might pay a price for that.
        
         | jpindar wrote:
         | My high school physics teacher was stationed at Eniwetok and he
         | told us a lot about it. His job was photography, and he showed
         | us some impressive photos of the explosions, including some
         | showing lightning striking the top of the mushroom cloud.
         | 
         | He mentioned that his son was adopted, though whether that was
         | by necessity or out of caution I don't know.
         | 
         | Anyway, he lived to an apparently healthy old age.
        
           | nonrandomstring wrote:
           | Thanks for sharing. Being a photographer must have meant some
           | line of sight exposure I guess. My old man was a radio
           | operator. As I understand it, they were investigation the
           | effects on communications, so he got stuck in a shack
           | listening to the EMP, guess he would have heard that
           | lightning in his headphones.
        
       | weinzierl wrote:
       | I find this super interesting. Around the time Chernobyl happened
       | I remember that damages for the subsequent generations were
       | widely sold as a fact by the media.
       | 
       | At university I had to do a course in radiation protection and
       | that was the first time when I heard this idea challenged.
       | Especially that we needed to distinguish between teratogenic
       | damage to the unborn during exposure and potential genetic damage
       | passed on to children conceived after exposure. The former was an
       | established fact the later a possibility no one had found proof
       | of.
       | 
       | The article seems not only to corroborate this, but also my
       | impression that these two things are regularly confused.
       | 
       |  _" Inasmuch as even today the issues are occasionally confused,
       | a clear distinction must be drawn between these studies and
       | studies on the children in utero at the time of the bombings."_
        
         | pyuser583 wrote:
         | If I remember right, the effects of radiation exposure for most
         | residents of Pripyat is much less damaging than smoking two
         | packs of cigarettes a day.
         | 
         | That's one of the problems with assessing the damage from
         | indirect exposure - things like drinking, smoking, lead
         | exposure, asbestos exposure, etc. are bigger irritants.
         | 
         | And control groups are very hard to manage for long term
         | (lifelong) studies.
        
           | tyingq wrote:
           | I imagine it's hard to say, given the amount of control the
           | USSR had over the press.
           | 
           | There's this credible sounding account of a little girl dying
           | in Pripyat from radiation exposure:
           | https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/books/voices-from-
           | chernob...
        
           | trhway wrote:
           | >the effects of radiation exposure for most residents of
           | Pripyat
           | 
           | Chernobyl didn't have much radiation directly radiated, and
           | the residents of Pripyat were relatively promptly evacuated.
           | The Chernobyl impact has been all about fallout. A bunch of
           | Russian soldiers for example who took over Chernobyl 3 month
           | ago and stayed there for a month until retreat, and who did a
           | lot of digging and armor driving without any PPE in one of
           | the most polluted places there - Red Forest - already got
           | acute radiation sickness as a result and the rest will have a
           | lot of problems down the road from all that fallout dust they
           | ingested.
           | 
           | Another example highlighting the fallout - Belarus where the
           | regions most hit by Chernobyl fallout are, ie. Homel and
           | Mogilev, has almost 50% higher cancer rates than Russia and
           | Ukraine (those 2 have pretty close rates between themselves
           | and similar to Belarus patterns of smoking, drinking,
           | nutrition, etc) mostly due to the higher cancer rates in the
           | Homel and Mogilev region. There is also some indications
           | about higher rate of children birth defects and various
           | genetic illnesses there. Those children naturally weren't
           | exposed to Chernobyl's direct radiation, it is its fallout
           | which continues to exist there.
        
       | yieldcrv wrote:
        
       | concordDance wrote:
       | Tl;dr: damage to the genes of adult atomic bomb survivors isn't
       | noticeable in the kids they concieve after the bombings.
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-04 23:00 UTC)