Radiation Exposure in Ukraine and Covid Susceptibility.
The paper I'll briefly discuss in this post is this one in Springer Nature's open access scientific journal Scientific Reports.
It is here: Yelizarov, M., Yelizarov, O., Berezovska, I. et al. Influence of the natural radon radiation on the spread of the COVID 19 pandemic. Sci Rep 13, 12752 (2023).
The table of contents for this issue of the journal came into my email Inbox this morning and I found time to go through it, coming on this paper and was compelled to open it.
The paper is a statistical analysis of radiation exposure in Ukraine that I will describe below, and rates of Covid. The work was underway well before criminal savages from Russia invaded Ukraine, and to some extent the work was disrupted by it.
A note before excerpting the article, which is available for interested parties to read in full, I will make a few remarks.
Radiation regulations in this country and many places around the world are largely based on experiments on rats in the 1940's and is known as the Linear No Threshold (LNT) assumption, that is the belief that their is no "safe" level of radiation exposure. On inspection, even without questioning the nature of these experiments, this is clearly nonsense, since the essential element potassium is radioactive and yet is essential to life.
The Health Physics Society has sponsored a series of discussions with Dr. Edward Calabrese, for whom the LNT is a bête noire of how dubious both the original work and the rote belief in it is: The History of the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Model Episode Guide
There are a lot of radiation paranoids here and elsewhere the and extremes to which they will go based on the assumption that any radioactivity anywhere, at any time is some kind of tragedy and climate change and the deaths of seven million people per year from air pollution, never mind extreme heat, are not. Just recently I had an exchange with one such person who argued that New England's forests (if they don't burn from climate change before it can be done) should be cut down and shoved into fire boxes to fire boilers and create more air pollution because um, in this person's imagination Vermont Yankee could have leaked radiation and wiped out 1/3 of Vermont.
One hears these kinds of things and one doesn't want to believe it.
If you ask these kinds of awful, ignorant people to show that in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear power that radiation leaks from reactors have killed as many people as will die today, 19,000 people roughly, one never gets a reputable reference showing as much, because reputable references do not exist.
An alternative to the LNT is the argument that small amounts of radiation can be beneficial under some circumstances; this theory is called hormesis. The molecular biology argument for a mechanism is this: Proteins are controlled by interactions, often proteomic signaling cascades from protein to protein, but also to small molecules, that are called allosteric interactions. These interactions consist of a molecule binding to a region of a protein in such a way as to affect a conformational change that leads to either activation or deactivation of the protein, with physiological results. An important example of these interactions is, in fact, the immune system, and the related repair proteins that recognize damaged molecules and cause them to degrade. Exposure can trigger the growth of these molecules, priming repair mechanisms to activate and in fact become stronger.
This is pretty much how vaccines work, by the way. They present molecules that trigger immune responses, causing immunity.
Hormesis is controversial, but it is also reasonable. Life has evolved in the presence of radiation and in fact, the air has always been radioactive because the Earth's crust leaks the radioactive gas radon from uranium ores which are in fact, ubitiquous.
I discussed the use of naturally occurring radon as a tracer for oceanic anthropogenic iron transport to the ocean in a recent post here: An Anthropogenic Iron "Invasion" of the Ocean Followed by Radioactive Polonium.
Anyway. It appears that Ukraine has significant deposits of uranium, and there are regions where radon levels are higher than in other areas. The authors have conducted a statistical analysis of Covid rates and exposure to natural radon. (I hope no one is disappointed to learn that this paper is not about Chernobyl.
Excerpts from the text:
In the fight against the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19), the main focus is placed on developing new and improving existing vaccines and drugs. However insufficient efficiency of available treatment options for this viral infection and often pulmonary complications have fueled the interest for alternative therapy. As an example, low-dose radiation therapy can be mentioned. Its immunological perspective and treatment results are under consideration and some of them have been published1.
It should be mentioned that low-dose radiation may be of natural origin. Its adverse influence has been explored in many aspects2, but potential impact on the course of some diseases is not clear, although there are certain signs of this impact3.
One kind of natural radiation is produced by radon, a noble radioactive gas, which is one of the decay isotopes of uranium.
Radon therapy found its application many years ago4,5,6. Nevertheless, long indoor stay under increased radon irradiation which occurred during COVID-19 lockdowns was recognized as a risk factor for cancer disease7.
In Ukraine, radon was recognized as “the most significant dose forming factor” in the irradiation of the population8. Generally, the level of natural radiation of the population was estimated with effective doses according to the recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection9 and the UNSCEAR dose coefficients10. An average annual effective dose of natural radiation includes the following components: an average annual effective dose due to indoor radon, an average annual effective dose of external gamma exposure produced by building materials and raw, an average annual effective dose due to radionuclides in drinking water11. This value was found to be equal to 3.5 mSv per year, with a substantial portion (72%) being formed by indoor radon—2.4 mSv per year. Dose values measured at ground floor in multistory buildings were 1.3–1.5. mSv per year, and they were about 1 mSv per year on upper floors. The weighted average effective dose from building materials is 0.23 mSv per year, which is lower than in previous years due to the introduction of new requirements for building materials. As an aside, it is worth mentioning drinking water which is another factor of the radon entry. Generalized results of the 20 years radon monitoring in Ukraine has showed that “for 11% of the tested water samples, 222Rn concentration exceeds the established state standard for drinking water (100 Bq/l)”12.
Health risks are assessed in many areas with high natural background radiation (HNBR), with China, Brazil, India and Iran being the most studied regions13.
In Yangjiang, China, an epidemiological study was carried out for 20 years in a HNBR area characterized by a uniform distribution of natural gamma radiation and great population stability. The comparison of this population with a control group of the same size in the neighboring area was based on examining about one million cumulative person-years in terms of cancer mortality. There was no increase in mortality in HNBR areas compared to the control group14...
...This article focuses on the analysis of normalized system statistics on the development of COVID-19 to detect certain regularities and (or) anomalies of this process depending on the geographical features of a particular area of Ukraine.
The article continues later on:
The list of recommended indications for radon treatment includes pulmonary diseases19.
Its clinical effects in respiratory and other diseases have been evaluated and discussed in many studies for example22,23. Radon therapy continues to be studied to gain medical evidence regarding its effectiveness and create a scientific basis to explain the controversy and the mechanism of radon treatment. It was shown that though radiation may increase production of free radicals, it activates their neutralization preventing expression of damaging actions of radicals. This may explain the beneficial effects of small doses of ionizing radiation24...
... The completeness of the analysis is limited by the lack of complete and reliable statistics from the four regions mentioned above. These regions are on the front line of the armed conflict. For this lack of more comprehensive, reliable and up-to-date data which are not currently available neither on the national nor local levels the most common and proven parametric methods of mathematical statistics cannot be used. However our next step will be refining the analysis in terms of mathematical statistics as soon as peace is restored and relevant statistics may be accessed.
Whether this statistical analysis holds up is not for me to decide, but I certainly believe that since life evolved in the presence of radiation, and since it is impossible to be alive without potassium, for example, and it is impossible now and has always been impossible to be isolated from radiation exposure, that the idea of hormesis may have some merit.
The paper is open and can be read by critics and supporters alike.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
