According to a study, 103 cases of thyroid cancer occurred in minors after the Fukushima disaster (Japan). Responsibility for radiation remains to be proven.
All the Japanese gathered on Friday afternoon, five years to the day after the historic earthquake that triggered a tsunami and the worst nuclear disaster in the past thirty years on the Fukushima-Daiichi (Honshu) site. A minute of silence was observed at 2:46 p.m., the exact time of the start of the tremors felt on the archipelago in 2011.
Even today, the Japanese are a traumatized people and many victims continue to suffer. And the worst is perhaps to come because the consequences of this tragedy are today difficult to measure. THEhe first fallout from the disaster on health is just starting to be felt. Especially among the youngest.
103 cases of cancer in minors
In this population, an abnormal number of children and adolescents indeed develop thyroid cancer, according to a study revealed in August 2015 carried out among 300,000 young Japanese in Fukushima prefecture.
Published in the journal Epidemiology, it says 103 cases of thyroid cancer have been reported in children and adolescents under the age of 18 who resided in Fukushima Prefecture between 2011 and 2014. That’s 25 more than last year. “It is difficult to establish a cause and effect link, but it is nevertheless necessary to continue the examinations, because the proportion of discoveries of tumors increases with age”, specified Pr Shunichi Suzuki when presenting the results.
No distribution of iodine
The figures are no less alarming. With this latest report, the Fukushima Prefecture Medical University team estimates that more than 30 in 100,000 children have thyroid cancer. By way of comparison, Miyagi prefecture, further north, counts only 1.7 per 100,000 minors. The children of Fukushima are thus 20 to 50 times more affected by thyroid cancer than the others. Conclusions criticized by some international experts who indicate that we do not have enough hindsight to advance such figures.
Regardless, it is known that usually stable iodine is given to people at risk in order to avoid cancer, but this was not practiced after the incident at the Fukushima nuclear site. Daiichi.
As a reminder, the Japanese government recognized for the first time at the end of October 2015 that the leukemia of a worker at the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant was due to radiation. But according to a report by two NGOs of doctors published on Thursday, the accident at the plant could cause 10,000 more cancers in the Japanese population
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