Geographical variation in mortality from leukaemia and other cancers in England and Wales in relation to proximity to nuclear installations, 1969-78

Abstract

Summary The distribution of mortality from 11 causes of death (lymphoid leukaemia, other Reports of an increased incidence of leukaemia in young people in the vicinity of certain nuclear installations have caused concern about the possible effect on communities that live near other such installations. The extent and localisation of the increase near Sellafield leaves no doubt about its reality (Gardner & Winter, 1984) but it is unclear how far many of the other reports represent selection of high rates that are bound to occur by chance, while low rates are neglected. To check this possibility the evidence relating to all the installations in the country needs to be examined. This, however, is not easy to do as the reorganisation of local government in 1974 altered the boundaries of most administrative units and made it difficult to obtain relevant figures for each area of interest over a long enough period.In England and Wales the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) overcame this difficulty by using the pre-1974 local authority areas (LAAs) and allocating the cancer registrations and deaths that had been reported since 1974 to the old areas . In that study, LAAs with more than a third of their population within 10 miles of an installation were' compared with control LAAs that were chosen to be more distant from the installations, but of similar population size, urban/rural status and, as far as possible, within the same standard region. The results suported the idea that in recent years the mortality from leukaemia, and especially lymphoid leukaemia, in young people tended to be relatively high in areas close to installations that began operations before 1955, but showed that in adults mortality from all cancers, considered as a group, tended to be relatively low . Some of the relatively high rates around nuclear installations were, however, difficult to assess, as the main reason for them was unusually low rates in the control LAAs.We have, therefore, tackled the problem in another way. Like OPCS we have limited ourselves to England and Wales Correspondence: P.J. Cook-Mozaffari.

Male-mediated developmental toxicity

“…58 Clusters were sought and identified in the vicinity of other nuclear establishments in the UK and other countries, [59][60][61] although leukemia clusters were not found exclusively in the vicinity of nuclear reactors. 62 The reports of Gardner et al 63,64 however, suggested that occupational exposure of men at Sellafield might be linked to increased susceptibility to leukemia or non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in children.…”

Solid-tumor mortality in the vicinity of uranium cycle facilities and nuclear power plants in Spain.

“…The validity of death-certificate diagnoses for investigating cancer is generally accepted (2,3,18,19). Except for Tarragona, none of the provinces studied are equipped with population-based cancer registries that would otherwise enable cancer incidence to be studied in these areas.…”

Iowa radon leukaemia study: a hierarchical population risk model for spatially correlated exposure measured with error

“…Since higher socio-economic status is a possible risk factor for lymphoproliferative disease [33][34][35], we conducted analyses with univariate Poisson models to examine the effect of the ARF factors described in Section 2.3. Frequentist, likelihood-based methods were used in this variable selection phase of the analyses since it would have been time-prohibitive to use the full Bayesian model.…”