Abstract
The development and application of new European software for cancer risk assessment after radiation exposure from a nuclear accident is described here. This software computes lifetime risks for several types of cancer and is intended to provide information for consideration by decision makers in the urgent and transition phases of nuclear emergencies. Such information on radiation related cancer risks can be useful to consider in the identification of protective measures (e.g., sheltering, evacuation, allocation of individuals to screening programmes and advice to take thyroid protection medication) in a differential way (i.e., for particularly susceptible sub-groups of a population). A description and application of the software for converting dose limits applicable after nuclear accidents into corresponding cancer risks, based on German population data, has already been published. Therefore, only a brief description of the main features of the software and some new illustrative results based on Swiss population data are given here, with some additional information on the input and output specification of the software.
Highlights
Radiation related cancer risk assessment software was not previously available for use immediately after a nuclear accident
The grouping “all solid cancer” will provide risk estimates with a higher statistical power than is obtainable for individual cancer sites, due to the much larger number of all solid cancers compared to the numbers of site specific cancers, in the datasets used to fit the radiation dose response curves for the additive and multiplicative excess risk to dose response models, see Figure 1
It is noteworthy that the 95% confidence intervals on the numbers of all solid cancer cases expected per 10,000 persons, at 100 mGy colon dose, over lifetime are still large e.g., 462 (95%CI: 12; 1258), 375 (95%CI: 8; 879) and 294
Summary
Radiation related cancer risk assessment software was not previously available for use immediately after a nuclear accident. After the Fukushima nuclear accident (Janssens, 2013) on 11th March 2011, two years elapsed between accident occurrence and the publication of the World Health Organization (WHO) health risk assessment (WHO, 2013) report. This two-year period, after the event, was required for assessing doses, developing a risk assessment framework and developing the risk assessment software, but did not allow enough time to include a full explicit mathematical treatment of risk uncertainties. The tool is based on the HRA methodological framework for assessing cancer risks after the Fukushima accident as developed and recommended by a WHO expert group (WHO, 2013; Walsh et al, 2014) and by the German ProZES project group (Jacob et al, 2017; Ulanowski et al, 2016)
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