[thedoc (OP)]

Marisa Morse asked the Naked Scientists:
   
My grandfather is a World War II Veteran. During the war he flew into Hiroshima and Nagasaki right after the atomic bomb was dropped. In the past few years, he has fought against prostate cancer and throat cancer. When we have recently tried to contact some of his old friends from the Navy, we have noticed that many of them have died from cancer.

I am wondering, is there any possible relative link between World War II Veterans who have been around the after effects of nuclear activity and cancer? If so, could this become hereditary amongst their offspring?
What do you think?

[yor_on]

Yes, in my opinion there is, although extremely hard to isolate beyond doubt. What one can do with all experiences involving radiation, not provable to have affected one immediately, is to analyze health etc statistically. The atmosphere is not so unlike the ocean in that manner. It 'dilutes' the concentration, and also makes it hard to define from where it belongs. But there should exist statistics over both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as there are accidents as the Chernobyl disaster from where western research seem to have drawn one conclusion, whereas research in the east have drawn another.

The old USSR can also be seen as a real goldmine for such research in that they used atom bombs for 'everything,' including testing to dig 'ditches', but statistics from that time became extremely flawed due to political, military as well as economic considerations, the doctors couldn't even mention radioactivity as being the  'cause of death'.  A similar  phenomena can be seen in the UN changing its warnings about atomic power after pressure from the USA somewhere in the fifties, so not only the USSR . 

And looking at today, with NATO starting to think in terms of 'limited nuclear wars' and Russia already acting as if that was a truth? Seems the lessons of yesterday disappear with the people having experienced it, or as P. T. Barnum expressed it. 'there's a new sucker born every minute'  although he failed to see that there was more than one to a minute. We put too much trust in people seeking power I suspect, maybe we should look for those not wanting it instead

http://www.davidmeyercreations.com/mysteries-of-history/the-most-toxic-place-on-earth/

[alancalverd]

Yes and no.

Radiogenic cancers do happen but they take between 5 and15 years to develop into clinically symptomatic tumors, not 70 years. Many men die with a prostate tumor but very few die from it, and overall the natural incidence of potentially fatal cancer is moving towards 50% as we don't die from anything else.

Whilst inherited radiogenic defects have been detected in laboratory mice and fruit flies, the human epidemiology is very weak  and most textbooks say "no actual evidence to date".  The childhood leukemia clusters reported in the 1970s around  some nuclear plants are almost certainly the result of in utero contamination with plutonium and not directly related to paternal gamma dose as was previously thought.

[evan_au]

The residents who were exposed to the atomic blasts certainly suffered from radiation sickness and elevated cancer risk over the subsequent years and decades (that is, the ones who didn't die of the immediate radiation and blast effects).

The Japanese government has been keeping careful track of cancer incidence in atomic bomb victims.

For those coming into Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after the explosions, exposure could have been reduced by use of prophylactic iodine tablets, dust masks, and clean food and drinking water. The radioactive content of the bombs was a few kilograms of plutonium and uranium, which (along with their decay products) would have been dispersed widely in the explosion itself, and by subsequent winds and rain.

For some statistics, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions_on_human_health#Long-term_effects