Dismantling Fixations on Failed Fictions: A-Bomb Survivor Study Denies The Low-Dose Radiogenic Cancer Narrative

Abstract

The linear no-threshold (LNT) model of low dose ionizing radiation's (LDIR) role in radiogenic cancer incidence has long served as a pseudo-scientific belief arising from evidence that has never been proven, but has been contested. One source of current evidence that favors the LNT model is the Radiation Effects Research Foundation’s (RERF) Life Span Study (LSS) cohort of Japanese atomic bomb survivors. The RERF has managed the input data, model development, and data analyses for the LSS cohort for 45 years, publishing research papers and reports updating the RERF’s progress. In recent years, the RERF has attempted to identify other cancer risk factors that may have played a role in the cancer incidence of cohort survivors, and this effort has drawn attention to the fact that many earlier years of papers and reports from the RERF have never considered these risk factors, making such publications of questionable merit. This investigation examines two recent papers from the RERF that denominate how the RERF now analyzes specific cancer incidence for cohort members, how it treats lifestyle and other risk factors for various cancers that have arisen in the cohort, and how it continues to find and assert that bomb-blast LDIR remains a distinguishable source of radiogenic cancer in the cohort. The investigation observes that the cohort input data and modeling have extensive deficiencies and defects, many having been identified by RERF authors themselves, that substantially compromise the findings of these two papers, and offers concluding evidence that the LDIR radiogenic cancer model is highly implausible if not impossible. From such evidence, a final conclusion must arise that supports a threshold model for the dose–response relationship between LDIR exposure and radiogenic cancer.