I am not a medical professional but I am looking for some professional input on this topic, so I hope it's ok for me to post the following here.
Grist is a magazine that I have followed for some time now and I appreciate a lot its content. In an article published in January 2025 that I started reading, it said the following:
In Fukushima, nobody died of radiation. Nobody will die of radiation. This is the scientific consensus on Fukushima: There’s no discernible increase in cancer or in birth defects or heart attacks or deformities in coming generations.
Let's just focus on cancer, more specifically on thyroid cancer. Taking into consideration that the Fukushima accident was in 2011, I find this statement about cancer to be bold (even tho the survival stats for thyroid cancer are very high), and perhaps misleading because they linked a 2016 WHO Q&A to back this claim. To my understanding, _after exposure [to ionizing radiation], the minimum latency period before the appearance of thyroid cancers is 5 to 10 years_. So I thought of digging a bit deeper.
I found a UN report from 2020/2021 and it says something quite different (brochure, Report Vol. I, Report Vol. II): that there was an actual increase of thyroid cancer but it was concluded that this was not related to the nuclear accident, but it was due to intensive screening. From the brochure:
Although a substantial number of thyroid cancers have been detected among exposed children, the Committee believes that, on the balance of available evidence, the (relative to expected) large increase in thyroid cancers is the result of ultrasensitive screening procedures that have revealed the prevalence of thyroid abnormalities in the population not previously recognized, and is not a result of radiation exposure.
According an article published in Februray 2025, and if I got this right, in the actual report (Vol. II) they exclusively used the Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS) which only followed up with people that were examined in 2011, and did not use the national and local cancer registries (CRs) to detect new patients in the years that followed. This sounds to me like the screenings were actually not extensive enough -- which is kind of the opposite to the ultrasensitive screening procedures claimed in the UN brochure.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of merged data from the CR and FHMS registries to evaluate the detection of thyroid cancer in Fukushima Prefecture. Merging of data from these registries was necessary to more fully capture the thyroid cancer cases after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. The NCR [National Cancer Registry], established in 2016, is more precise in capturing cancer cases compared to the local CRs, and it needs further development to become more precise.
It seems to me that the numbers of thyroid cancer in Fukushima have been downplayed. That said, I do acknowledge that since this is not my field and english is not my first language, I could be totally wrong. This is why I thought of sharing this rabbit hole I fell into here, because you would have a better understanding of this topic. So, please, let me know what you think, and if you have relevant links to share, I will totally appreciate them.
And thank you for taking the time to read this!
