[HN Gopher] Children of Chernobyl cleanup crew don't have excess...
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Children of Chernobyl cleanup crew don't have excess mutations
Author : rbanffy
Score : 150 points
Date : 2021-04-26 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| maybe vodka does have some hidden effect against radiation; i
| mean in places like Hiroshima you are said to have had a huge
| number of birth defects, because of the bomb.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160811120353.h...
|
| In fact, the mutation rate among the children of Hiroshima
| survivors is greatly exaggerated and not supported by evidence.
| According to that article _no_ health effects could be measured
| in the next generation. Another article:
|
| https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki
|
| Note the distinction mentioned here: children conceived prior
| to the bombing, whose mothers were pregnant when they were
| exposed to radiation, did suffer negative health outcomes.
| Children conceived afterwards have no measurable health impacts
| from their parents' exposure to the radiation. So the evidence
| of these various studies seems to indicate that whatever harm
| radiation exposure causes will not be passed on to the next
| generation via sperm or egg cells, and we can speculate about
| the reasons why (error correcting mechanisms, spontaneous
| abortion in early embryonic development, etc.).
| ols wrote:
| There is no evidence supporting your claim about Hiroshima
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234251/
| patall wrote:
| Interestingly, this is slightly contradictory to the finding that
| children of former radar workers have more DNMs[0]. Maybe
| explained by different type of radiation.
|
| [0] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/uob-
| tmi10051...
| bhouston wrote:
| The human body is incredibly good at detecting unviable mutations
| during pregnancy and it results in a miscarriage or other
| failures early on. This would be a much better indicator to look
| at than whether the children who survived pregnancy had excess
| mutations.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| While that is also a very important indicator, what proportion
| of viable pregnancies produce children with mutations I would
| argue is an even more important metric to study.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| it is an important metric if it has substance, but according
| to the above it has very little variance. Knowing how many
| pregnancies failed versus how many failed prior to the event
| could give us a better indicator of the damage caused.
| sitkack wrote:
| I think the question I feel the hive mind wants to answer
| is, "How much radiation can the species live with and not
| go extinct". If the birth rates are lower and mortality
| right is higher we can 'make up' for that. But if the
| offspring accrue hereditary damage, any amount is too much.
|
| We will have many many tough decisions to make due to the
| climate crisis.
| Symmetry wrote:
| And it's not just a matter of how much radiation either.
| Zap a bunch of fruit flies with a dose of x-rays all at
| once and see the next generation come out horribly
| mutated. Give them that same dose of radiation over the
| course of a month and see a perfectly healthy next
| generation.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Has that happened flies or animals that are immune to
| high radiation?
|
| I could see the next generation having horrible
| mutations, I could see the genes correcting some of this
| in the 3rd generation. I could see some of mutations
| living on but resistance to radiation would be so
| extremely useful we would build materials out of them
| which we are not doing today.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| That was my first thought when I saw the title. IIRC
| roughly 1/3 of pregnancies end within weeks, often before a
| woman is aware that she is pregnant, almost always because
| of a genetic mutation. Given that, if the miscarriage rate
| is higher, that would indicate that there is indeed an
| impact, but that our genome is very good at preventing
| dangerous mutations from propagating.
|
| Another possibility is that error-correcting mechanisms are
| good enough to deal with whatever impact exposure to that
| level of radiation had. One hypothesis about meiosis and
| genetic recombination is that it serves as an error
| correcting process, where damaged genes on one chromosome
| can be repaired using corresponding genes from the other
| chromosome.
| Symmetry wrote:
| That's very true but even if these forces catch 99% of
| significant mutations then you'd still see an increase in
| pregnancies resulting from that remaining significant mutations
| over baseline.
|
| But more importantly, our genomes have a lot of "junk DNA"
| where a mutation will not affect anything at all and almost
| everyone has these. From the article it looks like these were
| the mutations the researchers were looking at.
| sesuximo wrote:
| Wouldn't that depend on the size of the study? Seems like
| catching an orders of magnitude smaller difference would
| require orders of magnitude more samples... and the
| population is only so big..
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I remember hearing a hypothesis that "junk DNA" acts as a
| kind of shielding against mutations. From a probability
| standpoint, the more non-coding DNA you have, the less likely
| an error is to hurt the lifeform. Taken to an extreme, if
| every DNA sequence did something a singe error would cripple
| the organism.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I reject the term 'junk dna'. Until we understood the
| basics of DNA all of it was 'junk', then bit by bit we are
| making headway into understanding some of it. If we're ever
| done I predict there will be no junk DNA left. Nature is
| much too efficient to spend that much energy on something
| that it ends up not using.
| syrgian wrote:
| However, the probability of the DNA getting hit would
| increase linearly with the amount of junk DNA, wouldn't it?
| So the chance of good DNA getting hit is exactly the same
| as without junk.
|
| Not sure how it would help shielding the good DNA, unless
| it acted as a barrier.
| selectodude wrote:
| Mutations from radiation come from particles literally
| slamming into the DNA and screwing it up. The more spaced
| out the important parts are, the lower the probability
| that the particle hits a piece of DNA that's important.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If I place 4 cups of water out in the rain, does their
| spacing affect how much water lands in each cup?
| afiori wrote:
| It depends on how you place them, horizontaly on a table
| no, in a pyramid yes.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I see what you're getting at, but in this example there
| would be millions of cups and the individual raindrops
| would be spread out over a massive area of land.
| jakear wrote:
| That doesn't change anything. The probability an
| important cup gets hit is always equal to the surface
| integral of the rain's flux across the important cup
| openings. Whether there are unimportant cups nearby
| doesn't change anything.
| ruined wrote:
| that makes intuitive sense but at least in the case of
| ionizing radiation it's a little like making a target
| circle bigger to protect the bullseye which remains the
| same size. there's still the same chance of hitting the
| bullseye, no matter how you change the chance of not
| missing the paper.
| jxy wrote:
| Think of it as a 3D sphere instead. You would get a
| shielding effect.
| cma wrote:
| There is already one milligram of atmosphere over the
| cross sectional area of a cell nucleus, so it doesn't
| seem like it could change much for cosmic rays. All DNA
| in a human cell is about 6 picograms.
|
| That's 166 million times more mass of atmosphere. The
| elements may be less effective etc. but it still seems
| like any junk dna shielding would be negligible.
|
| Maybe cosmic rays aren't the main source of ionizing
| radiation throughout the evolutionary period though.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Aren't some of these early miscarriages not even known by the
| woman? Wouldn't that make it difficult to measure?
| lampe3 wrote:
| I was born in August 1986. In northern Poland.
|
| I was born in the 26 pregnancy week. 40 is the avg.
|
| Even if it was not near Chernobyl there were more miscarriage
| then usual.
|
| So yes looking at the children that survived is not the correct
| way looking at it.
|
| I also know that getting legit data for that is nearly
| impossible.
| Pyramus wrote:
| In most regions of southern Germany, many varieties of mushrooms
| as well as game (in particular wild boar) are still contaminated
| with >1k Bq/kg caesium 137 [1]. Even after 35 years (more than a
| half life) and Chernobyl being some 1500 km away. It's just mind
| boggling.
|
| [1]
| https://doris.bfs.de/jspui/handle/urn:nbn:de:0221-2020093023...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The wild boars eat moss growing on trees, which is a tremendous
| filter for particles.
|
| A reasonable cleanup process might be, harvest tree moss and
| reduce it to radioactive elements. Or just harvest the boars I
| guess?
| [deleted]
| dgellow wrote:
| To give a bit of context and relativize:
|
| > Between September 2012 and August 2013, 297 out of 752 boars
| exceeded legal limits of radiation -- particularly the
| hazardous isotope Caesium 137, which has a 30-year half-life
| and decays slowly. But to give an idea of how strict the
| regulations really are, experts say that a person would have to
| eat 13 kilograms of contaminated meat to get the same low-level
| radioactive effects of being on a transatlantic flight.
|
| Quote from this article from 2014:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/chernobyl-disaster-
| leaves....
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Caesium 137, which has a 30-year half-life and decays
| slowly
|
| Forgive my layman's ignorance, but "decays slowly" is just a
| less precise version of the "30-year half-life" statement,
| right?
| bluGill wrote:
| Either way it is wrong. 35 years is fast enough to not
| worry about long term. It only takes a couple centuries for
| anything with a half-life that small to complete decay. For
| nuclear waste we worry about things with half-lives in the
| thousands of years as we can't be sure we can store it for
| as long as it is dangerous.
|
| The real question then becomes what does it decay into? A
| lot of things decay some something with a dangerously long
| half life.
| Pyramus wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand, are you saying we should not
| worry about immediate effects that only affect 1 or 2
| generations?
|
| I don't see why thinking about negative effects over
| different timespans should be exclusive - climate change
| certainly won't be an issue in thousands of years (if we
| still exist).
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm saying 30 year half lifes are still considered short.
| We still need to worry for a few generations, but that is
| enough to remain in memory. If we forget about the
| problem in 300 years - that is 10 half lives and so it
| isn't a big deal. If something has a 1000 year half life
| it will be dangerous far longer than we can remember to
| watch out.
| Someone wrote:
| Yes, but assuming equal mass of radio active material and
| identical radiation output something with a half-life of
| 1000 years is less dangerous, radiation-wise (it still
| might be more poisonous)
|
| Caesium is often brought up in this kind of discussions.
| I think one reason might be because it decays fast enough
| to be harmful and still slow enough to be harmful for
| considerable time.
|
| Another reason might be that more of it gets released in
| your typical nuclear accident. I wouldn't know whether
| that is true.
| bluGill wrote:
| My point is about what is considered a long time, not
| relative dangers. Caesium is bad for a few hundred years.
| Some things are not as bad overall, but over the next
| 10,000 years is worse. Caesium in fact has been through
| one half life, and so is half as bad as it was at the
| start.
| Pyramus wrote:
| Why would there be disagreement about what is considered
| a long time? You are arguing that longer half life = bad,
| shorter half life = less bad, which misses the point.
|
| An effect with a shorter half-life could be a lot
| worse/more dangerous/threatening (potentially
| apocalyptic) than an effect with a longer half life.
| cbmuser wrote:
| They are. But you would have to eat 50 kilograms of these
| mushrooms to get a dose of 2 mV which is the safe annual dose
| for your average Joe:
|
| >
| https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w...
|
| > https://xkcd.com/radiation/
|
| If you're a smoker, you're probably exposing yourself to higher
| doses per year than anyone eating these mushrooms during
| mushroom season.
| tremon wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying that one
| needs to eat 50 kilogram of those daily to exceed the safe
| annual dose, or that if one eats 50 kilogram over a year,
| they'll have amassed more radiation from that single source
| than is considered safe?
|
| If the latter, is it safe expose yourself to more than
| [annual dose/365] in a short time? Because 50 kg/year is just
| 150 gram/day, and some people eat more than that in one
| sitting.
| amelius wrote:
| Reminds me of atomic gardening, where the radiation is
| deliberately introduced to perform mutation breeding:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
| ipaddr wrote:
| It is still contaminated because the half live is 30 years.
| After 35 years it is half as strong. In 350 years it will still
| be contaminated but it would have halved 10 times.
| fastball wrote:
| *300 years
| yk wrote:
| From the abstract of Morton & al. which is one of the studies
| linked at the bottom:
|
| > The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident increased
| papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) incidence in surrounding regions,
| particularly for 131I-exposed children. [...]
|
| > Radiation-related genomic alterations were more pronounced for
| those younger at exposure. Transcriptomic and epigenomic features
| were strongly associated with driver events but not radiation
| dose. Our results point to DNA double-strand breaks as early
| carcinogenic events that subsequently enable PTC growth following
| environmental radiation exposure.
| philmcc wrote:
| Just saw this on my twitter feed, which gives the impression that
| the conception date of the children could possibly affect it.
|
| https://twitter.com/jenvcampbell/status/1386602322839674881
| henryackerman wrote:
| That would make sense. Embryos with bad genetic mutations are
| quite often rejected. The mother does not even have to notice
| this.
| paganel wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that, it was very powerful. I was lucky
| enough to be born a few years before Chernobyl, but I have a
| close friend who was born just after and who also has some
| congenital non-standard body-related "things".
|
| Maybe it is all a coincidence, fact is many (if not almost all)
| of these individual stories haven't been statistically
| collected and analysed, it's just a "hidden continent" of very
| sad personal stories that will be forgotten once the affected
| people will no longer be alive to tell them.
| steeve wrote:
| I feel for her struggle, but this is disinformation.
|
| She starts with the false claim that the Chernobyl disaster
| "killed hundreds of thousands of people". UNSCEAR (the IPCC of
| radiation) puts the death toll at 50 people, + 6000 thyroid
| cancers for those who were children at the time (due to
| radioactive iodine sticking on the thyroid) [1]. This is why
| folks who live near a nuclear power plant are given iodine
| pills: to saturate the thyroid so it doesn't use the
| radioactive one. This mostly useful for children.
|
| She then attributes her defects on mutations originated from
| radionuclides induced DNA damage. Unfortunately there is no way
| to verify that claim, since there is no discernible health
| effect under 100mSv/year, which her parents definitely were not
| exposed to since they were in England.
|
| [1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
| maratc wrote:
| > She starts with the false claim that the Chernobyl disaster
| "killed hundreds of thousands of people".
|
| This claim is repeated e.g. by National Geographic on
| Instagram [0]: "More than 100,000 people may have succumbed
| to Chernobyl-related illnesses."
|
| [0]: https://www.instagram.com/p/COGV1yzFkO-/
| kingsloi wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this.
|
| Anecdotal, my wife and I became parents to a beautiful baby
| girl in September last year. Our lil girl was diagnosed with
| heart disease, and ultimately we discovered she has a rare
| genetic disorder called Kabuki syndrome. She has many other
| morbidities, turns out Kabuki affects multiple systems, heart,
| kidney, hearing, spine, hips, endocrine, etc. We live in Gary,
| IN. A few years ago there was a spill in Lake Michigan from one
| of the steel mills. I was in the water on/around the time,
| because the alarm wasn't raised for a few days. My child's
| condition is so rare, that it took me a while to comprehend
| really how rare. I questioned whether the two are related.
| There have been studies about respiratory issues (asthma, heart
| disease, etc.) near steel mills. I run a local website to track
| our air pollution https://millerbeach.community, wish I was
| able to track drinking water in real-time, because drinking the
| same water discharged from steel mill sounds horrific.
|
| https://www.in.gov/idem/cleanwater/resources/arcelormittal-f...
| fallingfrog wrote:
| You know, the feeling of surprise is the most important feeling
| there is. It's a clue that somewhere in your network of facts
| about the world, something doesn't fit.
|
| Without surprise, you cannot learn anything new. Without surprise
| there is no change. If you are never surprised then you are
| stagnating.
|
| I _welcome_ surprise. I enjoy it. It means that tomorrow I will
| be smarter than I was yesterday.
|
| What happens to a group of people when someone gets mocked or
| downvoted for being surprised about something? What happens in a
| school where you punish kids for speaking up in class with the
| wrong answer? Nobody speaks up. Nobody takes the risk. Everyone
| strives to be the same- same ideas, same stupidity. Boring. Give
| me surprise any day over that.
|
| Don't fucking _downvote_ me for saying I was surprised. That's
| how a community dies.
|
| It must be wonderful for those of you who _already know
| everything_. But for those of us who don't, and prefer to try to
| learn, don't try to rob us of the joy of being surprised.
| rriepe wrote:
| It should cost 1 karma to downvote.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Most communities welcome surprise, when it's signaled.
|
| Saying "X is surprising, given Y" and then posting links to Y
| doesn't signal surprise. It signals "I believe that X is false
| and here is my evidence".
| fallingfrog wrote:
| This is a surprising finding, given that the increased number of
| mutations in the wildlife around Chernobyl is well documented:
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/nuclear-accidents...
|
| https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348
|
| But, perhaps it's because the humans were exposed for a shorter
| period of time before they were all evacuated.
| maratc wrote:
| The humans weren't eating the local (contaminated) produce, and
| those who stayed -- due to their advanced age -- and were
| eating it, probably weren't reproducing.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Yes, that seems likely to be a large part of it. Maybe, the
| takeaway is that radiation in food or taken internally is
| more mutagenenic than radiation externally? Or that total
| exposure matters more than acute exposure?
|
| I called this a "surprising" finding and you know, surprising
| findings are the bedrock of discovery. Sadly I seem to have
| triggered a few people who can't handle the fact that the
| world is an uncertain place we don't completely understand.
| It must be hard to live in a world where being surprised is
| so threatening.
| maratc wrote:
| It's hard for me to see why. It looks pretty much expected
| that creatures that stay in contaminated areas and consume
| contaminated food have more mutations than creatures that
| don't. What's so "surprising" about it?
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Well, the radiation exposure was enough to kill several
| of those workers outright, and the rest had hugely
| elevated rates of cancer. In one instance the pregnant
| wife of one worker spent too much time with him and the
| radiation emanating from his body was enough to give her
| a miscarriage.
|
| And yet the article makes a very strong claim: all that
| radiation didn't cause any rise in birth defects at all!
| That's surprising. It certainly caused defects in the
| animals in the area, who didn't have the insanely high
| exposure as the workers- albeit the workers were exposed
| for a shorter time.
|
| So something is going on here which I freely admit I
| don't completely understand.
|
| I just thought of another possibility: all the workers
| who suffered that exposure were men. Perhaps, radiation
| on a developing fetus is mutagenic, but radiation
| exposure in sperm is less so, maybe the sperm that
| develop after the acute exposure is gone are normal!
| maratc wrote:
| > the radiation exposure was enough to kill several of
| those workers outright
|
| I gather no wildlife took part in putting the fires off.
|
| > the pregnant wife of one worker spent too much time
| with him and the radiation emanating from his body was
| enough to give her a miscarriage.
|
| Did you see that in the HBO Miniseries?
|
| "Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that,
| because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant
| wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital
| room. First, as discussed, none of the victims were
| radioactive--their exposures were almost exclusively
| external, not internal. More importantly, risk to a fetus
| from an exposure like this is infinitesimally small." [1]
|
| [1] https://cancerletter.com/filmtv/20190524_3/
| johndoe42377 wrote:
| Why would they? The probability that a damaged by radiation copy
| of a gene ends up in a spermatozoa which wins the lottery is
| zero.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Encouraging news! What a tragedy Chernobyl was. Both in the lives
| lost and those forever altered by the event.
|
| Compounded on that is also the humongous set back it contributed
| to for no-carbon energy. Now we are at a point where some
| congressional leaders are telling us the world may end in as soon
| 12 years[0] because of the man-made climate emergency. Since the
| situation is that dire perhaps the small risks of modern nuclear
| energy are a better alternative?
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHk8nn0nw18
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Why do you assume congressional leaders have any expertise that
| qualifies them to be taken seriously on climate issues?
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