CNN Online: Weighting the health risks of radiation exposure: Could Radiation Be Hurting Your Health?
One aspect of great health care and healthy living is becoming educated. The risks of radiation exposure are hotly debated, but a recent report by CNN sheds light on this controversial issue:
Why radiation is scary
The odds of developing cancer from radiation exposure are very small, but risks do rise the more you get zapped and the younger you are when you’re radiated, according to the National Academy of Sciences. This means putting off radiating medical scans, if they’re not medically necessary, is always good for you because radiation can damage cell DNA– and that damage can lead to cancer years down the road. It’s true that your body can repair the damage or the cell may simply die. But the earlier you get radiated, the more opportunity there is for uncorrected errors to start cropping up in your DNA.
Know your radiation footprint
To understand what’s typical and how radiation adds up, remember this number: 3 mSv. (mSv stands for millisievert, the scientific unit of measurement for radiation.) That’s how much radiation, on average, a person in the United States absorbs in a year from background sources such as sunlight, soil, and radon gas that may be in our homes or offices. “If you add the man-made sources like radiation from smoke detectors or X-rays it rises to an average of about 3.6 mSv,” says Cynthia McCollough, Ph.D., a radiation-dose researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. That’s not much, but your footprint gets bigger fast if you have multiple radiation-based medical tests.
For more about weighing the risks of radiation check out “Could radiation be hurting your health?”