EDITORIAL

Abstract

Five years have passed since Frank Phillips and I took over from Monty Charles and Gerry Harte. Our natural span has thus arrived and we pass the Journal on to Richard Wakeford and Jim Gray. They will be putting together the June issue. The five years have been busy but in some way uneventful. In the previous five years we had Chernobyl (or at least the unwinding and early evaluation of the consequences), epidemiology reached some kind of peak, radon came as a major potential public health scare but seemed to be assimilated into the general risk environment rather readily. Other concerns were around then and stay with us now (medical exposures, waste disposal, say). They are important but seem not to have generated too much excitement. In our term these issues waned and we had no major changes in our perception of the harm caused by radiation and no great developments in standards. If this were science we would say that we are going through a period of normal science: an accepted framework, developing earlier ideas and filling in the gaps. The Journal carried much good science and much thoughtful analysis but, meteorologically speaking, it is a period of settled weather. Of course storms rage elsewhere but it seems to me only small storms. The highest profile targets generating the greatest fury in the UK are roads planned through nice countryside. Concerns about aircraft, ship, rail and road safety exist but are generally left to politicians to sort out. There are very specific areas of risk that generate heat - gun control, BSE - but they do seem to be very specific. They are also very different. Gun control is a purely social argument where everyone has as much data available to them as everyone else. The BSE debate is (or `was'?) based on the interpretation of data that only the scientists can really understand. Can this current public obscurity of radiation continue? In the azure sky there seem few clouds. Maybe radioactive waste will become an issue. Perhaps as part of the alarmingly new concept of evidence-based medicine (`alarmingly' because I had imagined that medicine was by definition `evidence-based') there will be closer scrutiny of medical exposures. Can there really be new information about the hazards of radiation that will significantly change our views? Who can know this? I would not wish disruption on colleagues and friends getting on with their jobs of producing power, reprocessing fuel, treating waste, diagnosing and treating patients, evolving standards, protecting the environment, researching, developing instruments. However, my money is on things livening up again. Good luck Richard and Jim. Geoff Meggitt