I am forwarding this on behalf of a HIFA member in Russia. It describes a specific myth about alcohol consumption in nuclear workers. We look forward to hear examples and observations in other countries.
Dear All,
I'm a Radiologist with the specialization in Evident-Based Medicine and Biostatistics, working in the field of Radiation Epidemiology. The scope of our research interest is the cancer and non-cancer deseases risk assessment among nuclear workers exposed to external and internal exposure to professional radiation, over the background risk resulted from radiation and non-radiation risk factors, such as age at exposure, gender, tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption, etc.
Among nuclear workers at early time of nuclear program, when the occupational radiation doses were high, there were an opinion that alcohol helps to eliminate the radiation from the body, so there were large amount of radiation workers who were regular alcohol drinkers.
Measuring the individual dose of alcohol consumption to assess the related health risks is complicated due to several factors, mostly because of time-dependent process. The estimates of risk related to alcohol consumption are often biased due to uncertainty when use the survey data on alcohol consumption dependent on the psychology of respondents, so the methodology of measuring the true level of individual alcohol consumption must developed.
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HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
