Note: Professor Busby's paper Radiation exposure and heart attacks in children of Fukushima (pdf), 9 Sept 2011, covers all the points made in this interview in greater detail, complete with charts and graphs.

 

Transcript

 

Dr. Chris Busby: I am Christopher Busby. I am an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation, and I want to talk to you about Fukushima and Chernobyl. What I want to say is that the models that they used to determine the effects of radiation always concentrate on cancer and leukemia. And so the current risk model would say how many cancers are expected after Fukushima and how many cancers are expected after Chernobyl and so forth. But we know from Chernobyl that radiation causes a whole range of diseases, and one of the diseases that it seems to cause is heart disease. I want to talk to you about heart disease effects in children. Now a colleague of mine, Professor Yury Bandazhevsky, became quite famous because he studied the effects of Cesium 137 exposure to children in the areas that were contaminated by the Chernobyl accident in Belarus. He discovered in the late 90's, he discovered that the children who were contaminated to the extent of having only 20 to 30 becquerels per kilogram --which is not very much-- of Cesium 137, were suffering cardiac arrhythmias. That is, the heart was not beating properly. And they were suffering heart attacks and dying. It is a pretty serious matter. So it was not a question of leukemia or cancer in these children, although that occurs as well, but there were very high rates of heart disease in these children. And the children were manifesting heart diseases which are normally only found in old people. And this got me thinking about how this could be. What appears to be quite a low level of contamination. So I started looking into this, and what I found was truly extraordinary, which I shall share with you. The heart of a child, at the age of about 2-5, is about this size [Prof. Busby holds up a small blue plumb], and at the age of ten is about this size [he picks up a slightly larger tomato], and we know from measurements that have been made how many cells there are in the heart of the child. A five year old child has a heart which is approximately 220 grams in weight. A lot of it of course is blood, so if you take the blood out and just leave the muscle tissue, there is about 85 grams of muscle tissue in the heart of a child at age 5. This is old data. Now we actually know also the size of the heart and the heart muscle cells. So we know how many cells there are in the child's heart. There are about three billion muscle cells in a child's heart. So this is a number, three billion. And what we can do is we can put 50 becquerels per kilogram of Cesium in a thought experiment, we can put into this heart muscle, and a becquerel is one disintegration per second. So we can see how many disintegrations, at how many electron tracks come from thos Cesium 137 in a period of about a year. And when we do this sum, and it is really simple, it can be done on the back of an envelop, what we find out is that there are many, many more electron tracks traversing the cells than you can imagine. In fact, if works out that if only 1% of those cells were killed by the electron tracks from that level of Cesium 137, if only one percent were killed, you would lose 25% of all the muscle cells in the heart. This is very serious, because the heart is an extraordinary organ. The muscle cells in the heart are autonomous. They just contract and they contract and they contract for the whole period of the life of the individual. And every day they pump 7,000 liters of blood through the body, truly extraordinary, and we live for 70 years. So this heart beats away continously through the whole of your life span. But of course these cells are nonreplaceable by and large. It turns out that only 1% of these cells can be replaced in a year. So if these cells get damaged, or if a particular number of these cells get damaged, they cannot be replaced in a short period of time. So a year's exposure to 50 becquerals per kilogram of Cesium 137, and incidentally Cesium 137 we know from experiments binds to muscle, so this is where it goes, just like iodine goes into the thyroid gland, and strontium goes into the bone and it goes into the DNA. Cesium 137 goes into the muscle, so it will concentrate in the muscle tissue of the heart. So this child's heart, after one year of exposure to that level of Cesium, which is quite a small level, will have approximately 25% of its cells destroyed. Now we would therefore expect to find effects, and the same effects that were found by Bandazhevsky. And it does seem, from what people have been telling me about children in the Fukushima-affected area that they are actually suffering heart attacks. So there are two things which follow from this which are terribly important. The first thing is that children in that area should immediately be scanned using ECGs, electrocardiograms -- all hospitals have these devices -- to see whether they have conduction problems. Because the first manifestation of damage to the heart muscle would be conduction problems which can be shown on these ECGs. And in fact this is how Bandzhevsky found it. And incidentally, Bandazhevsky, when he reported this, was sent to jail.The government wouldn't believe it, and they said he was scaremongoring. And so they sent him to jail. He was in jail for seven years until eventually Amnesty International and the European Commission, the European Parliament, issued him an international passport. One of only 25 that have ever been issued, and brought him out of jail. So I worked quite closely with Bandazhevsky, who was a hero. He received the Edward P. Radford memorial prize for radiation biology at the Lesvos conference where he gave this paper which showed that there were these increases in heart disease in these children. So the first thing that has to be done is the children have to be checked out for conduction problems with an ECG.
Interviewer: Evacuated!
Dr. Busby: Yes. And of course if any of them are suffering from these problems, they should be immediately evacuated. But if any of them are suffering from these problems, then all of the children should be evacuated, because it means there will be subclinical effects from the Cesium 137 in heart muscles, and it will not be repaired. Heart cannot be repaired. Heart tissue cannot be repaired. These children will suffer for the whole of their life and will die young. Which brings me to the second point. The second point is this, that if you die from heart attack, or heart disease, you will not die from cancer, because cancer is essentially a disease of old people. So you get genetic damage and it goes on and on and on and eventually you get cancer. By and large what happens is the cancer rates go up very sharply as you get old. But I can tell you this that the heart disease effects go up very much more quickly. So what you will find in areas like Fukushima that are contaminated with these radionucleotides is not necessarily an enormous increase in cancer. There will be an increase in cancer, but you will find a big increase in heart disease. And actually when we look at Belarus we find both of those things. We find an increase in cancer, but we find a big increase in heart disease. An enormous increase in heart disease. And as a result of this, the demographic index of the Republic of Belarus has fallen sharply after the Chernobyl accident, and now has gone into negative replacement. So in fact if it goes on like this, the population of Belarus will disappear. And this is what we would expect to see in Fukushima. So I am warning you now to start looking out for heart disease, heart attacks, and getting little children out of there quickly. This is all simple stuff. You can do these calcuations, and I have done these calculations when I produced a report that shall be put on the Internet shortly. You can have a look at them. Also the European Committee on radiation risk also released early the Bandazhevsky paper that he gave at the Lesvos conference, and that is on the web site of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, which is www. euradcom.org, or euradcom. Thank you all for listening.

 

Additional References

2011-09-09 Radiation exposure and heart attacks in children of Fukushima (pdf),
"...It has been known for many years that the nuclide Cs-137 is concentrated in muscle. Let us introduce 50Bq/kg of Cs-137 into this heart muscle tissue. This is 50 tracks per second
from the Cs-137 beta particle and maybe another 20 tracks per second from the gamma ray decay of the daughter Ba-137m. This is 70 tracks per second. Each track intercepts about 400 cells. For a child chronically contaminated at this level through living on Cs- 137 contaminated areas for one year, the number of tracks is simply 70x 60x60x24x365 = 2.2 x 109 tracks per kilogram per year. This means that the number of cells hit by a
radiation electron track, per kilogram is 8.8 x 1011
For this model we immediately see that every heart cell will be hit by a radiation track about 25 times. If only 1 percent of these tracks caused the cell to die, it means that the child’s heart would lose 25% percent of its functional capability: all the cells would be dead. The necrosis would lead to conduction problems, just like it does in old people, and cardiac arrythmias and heart attacks would ensue. It must be noted that heart muscle cannot regenerate itself except very slowly, indeed it was originally though that heart cells could not replace themselves. Following discovery that Carbon-14 from the 60s
atmospheric tests was incorporated into hearts, it was seen that there was a 1% replacement per year. So we see that the heart is the critical organ in the body. The cells when damaged cannot be repaired. This is why the children of Chernobyl have been developing cardiac problems and dying. It is why the adult population of Belarus has been developing cardiac problems and dying Fig 2, Fig 3 [ Bandashevsky 2011]..."
2005 Meet Galina Bandazhevskaya, Pediatrician, Minsk, Belarus [wife of Professor Yury Bandashevky and medical doctor] by Mads Ekesen, Chernobyl: 20 Years, 20 Lives.
..."Right into the 1990s they observed an alarming number of children with heart problems and a dramatic increase in the number of congenital heart disorders. Often children as young as six had arrhythmia. Therefore they began to keep statistics on their patients and discovered that there were 2½ times as many cases of heart disorders in children after Chernobyl as there had been before the disaster. When one is the first to research a subject there will always be much uncertainty connected with the results. Yury would have to do controlled research for many years in order to conclude that it was the radioactivity that was the single reason for the increased number of heart disorders..."
2003-05-22 Belarusian Professor Studying Chernobyl Consequences Remains In Prison by Rashid Alimov, bellona.no
"The European Union, or EU, representatives, who are part of the EU's Minsk diplomatic mission, are visiting regions of Gomel and Mogilev — the Belarusian districts most severely contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl explosion — from May 21 to 23, Bandazhevsky, the founder and chancellor of the Gomel State Medical Institute published in 1999 the results of years worth of research on the clinical consequences of cesium-137 — one of the most radioactive elements released by the disaster — impacts on human organism. His results showed that it leads to heart disease, cataract, early ageing and other maladies.
But his research jeopardized the Belarusian authorities' intention to recommence farming lands contaminated by Chernobyl. Just before his arrest in 1999, Bandazhevsky had harshly criticized official researches, sponsored by the Belarusian government, which allocated only 1bn roubles for `scientifically and practically useful research,' and said the remaining scientific budget of 17bn was wasted. Bandazhevsky also argued that Belarus was engaged in a hidden scam of selling and exporting radioactive vegetables along with non-contaminated products — a practice he viewed as sheer folly.
Bandazhevsky's Research
Bandazhevsky and his wife Galina examined cardiograms of children and carried out series of autopsies in the forensic morgue in Gomel. The scientific results proved that, after the Chernobyl accident, cardiovascular system sickness rate increased by four times.
Prior to Bandazhevsky studies, increases of cesium-137 concentrations from 10 to 30 times in vital human organs were considered insignificant. He proved, however, that such concentrations lead to pathological abnormalities. For instance, a pathology can be seen when cesium is accumulated in a human organism at the rate of only 30-50 Bq/kg. Autopsies of one-year-old children in Gomel showed high levels of radiocesium in their organs — up to 6000 Bq/kg, which indicates a severe radioactive toxic syndrome, both among foetuses and newborn babies..."

Yury Bandazhevsky at Wikipedia