Fukushima health effects remain a mystery.

• Position: Your Life - Brief article

With the recent passing of the 66th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, studies of health effects from those events provide some clues to the potential, long-term impacts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, relates Randolph Carter, professor and associate chair of the Department of Biostatistics at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.), who has worked with the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Japan, which conducts population-based studies on the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb detonations. Carter used RERF data to develop the Cardiovascular Metabolic Risk Index to study correlations between radiation dose and risk factors among survivors.

He says that the first and most noticeable health effects expected to emerge in people exposed to the highest radiation doses during and after the Japanese nuclear disaster are thyroid disorders, such as hypothyroidism, some thyroid cancer cases, and leukemia, to be followed in subsequent years by small increases in risk...