bitmap@ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (03/10/84)
An article of last January (I think) discussed the survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (there was a Japanese word for them, but I've forgotten it). It gave some figures as to how many survivors there were and commented on the number of deaths among the survivors. Here are some quotes from Mar/84 Science Digest (without permission): "...the 82,000 survivors of the 1945 atomic-bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki." The previous article had a much higher figure, I think. Not sure how one defines 'survivor'. "In 1974, the U.S. National Cancer Institute calculated that only 100 of the 82,000 survivors had died from cancer caused by radiation exposure..." Sorry, they don't give a reference, but one could contact the Institute, I guess, if you don't believe the figures. "It is now believed that the survivors received an average of 25 to 30 rads of radiation, or a mean of 28 rads, and, says Gofman, 'many are surprised to find that the average dose of the exposed Japanese atom-bomb survivors is comparable to that received during some common diagnostic exams in American medicine.'" These data are put here in rebuttal to the previous article (sorry, I don't remember the title or author) which seemed to say that the Japanese A-bomb survivors were dying like flies from their exposure to radiation. (These weren't the author's words, and I think that he was quoting from something else, but that seemed to be the thrust of the previous article). Sam Hall, UCB