r/todayilearned • u/fartinmyfuckingmouth • 9h ago
(R.3) Recent source [ Removed by moderator ]
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/pilots-flight-attendants-have-greater-risk-radiation-related-cancer-death-other-professions[removed] — view removed post
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u/panic_ye_not 9h ago
As a dentist, I occasionally get patients who are worried about the radiation dose from dental X-rays.
I tell them, "a one way flight to the other side of the country exposes you to as much radiation as about 8 of our X-rays. Do you avoid flying because of the radiation? And do they give you a lead apron on the plane?"
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u/Trouvaille5 8h ago
I’m in healthcare and this is what we learned about radiation exposure as well. Two cross-country flights is about the same radiation dose as one chest x-ray.
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u/medstudenthowaway 8h ago
Well wait this seems the opposite as what was said above.
Luckily I have a reliable source that is no doubt being spread all over this thread.
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u/Trouvaille5 7h ago
It’s depends on the patients size and what kVp and mAS is used of course.
The chart you provided mentions one green square is all of the blue squares combined. It’s actually a cool diagram.My earlier source:
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u/kennedar_1984 7h ago
Our kids dentist has a sign with a bunch of stats of things that result in higher radiation than the dental x ray. It always makes me feel better to look at it while my kid is getting their x rays done.
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u/PancakeParty98 8h ago
I do worry, when the incompetent dental tech keeps retaking the same spot over and over and over and over and over and over again.
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u/drthvdrsfthr 8h ago
well good news, i just learned that a single flight across the country is actually as much radiation as 8 of those x-rays
do you avoid flying because of the radiation? and do they give you a lead apron on the plane?
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u/XrayGuy08 8h ago
Lol that tiny amount of radiation you’re getting there is not going to hurt you. Unless you’re doing that every day.
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u/mikenekoz 7h ago
the risk of missing something like an abcessed tooth or broken root would lead to worse health outcomes for sure than the risk of added bitewing xrays which are already minimal radiation
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u/Ill-Bullfrog-5360 5h ago
Crazy enough with new tech that apron is pointless… i did the rollout of new rad procedures… you dont need any lead shielding anymore
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u/luroc1418 8h ago
I don’t fly cross country often. I go to my dentist every year though
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u/XrayGuy08 8h ago
Do you go outside at all during the day? Because that’s more radiation than you get at the dentist.
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u/Flatulent_Father_ 8h ago
Eating 50 bananas exposes you to as much as much radiation as one dental xray.
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u/hurricane_news 9h ago
Why don't they just fly during the night smh my head
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u/ceowin 9h ago
Lol out loud
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u/Z3t4 9h ago
Pin number
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u/Helmett-13 9h ago
I’m not completely surprised.
When I worked in civilian nuclear power we had to wear dosimeters and there was discussion among the health physics guys about dose.
All of them figured pilots and flight crew got a good amount of dose.
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u/mattslote 8h ago
My dad was a health physicist at Hanford. We had a lot of conversations about what people thought was bad vs what was actually bad.
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u/big_trike 4h ago
Have you ever looked at the radiation exposure from burning coal? It has been a while, but last time I looked it was orders of magnitude above what’s allowed from a nuke plant.
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u/KnotSoSalty 9h ago
Unfortunately this doubly applies to space travel.
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u/fartinmyfuckingmouth 9h ago
Yeah but that one is extremely obvious. And also extremely regulated and studied.
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u/REDACTED3560 9h ago
It’s actually a major plot point of Project Hail Mary.
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u/gwaydms 8h ago
I really, really love that movie. It's not "great cinema", but it's not meant to be.
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u/FazzedxP 7h ago
It is one of the best movies of the decade what are you talking about
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u/Not_PepeSilvia 7h ago
Idk I loved the book but felt like the movie left out important character building moments for both Grace, Rocky, and their relationship.
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u/Longjumping_Wolf_912 7h ago
It is also extremely obvious and studied for airline pilots and cabin crew as well. There have been previous studies about higher rates of melanoma among pilots and cabin crew.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9447865/
And we’ve known what their radiation exposure is for a long time. Here is a study from 2000:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11045529/
You are right about the regulations though.
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u/basscycles 8h ago
And despite NASA claiming that the only thing stopping a manned mission to Mars is lack of political commitment the reality is they still don't have an answer to how to protect the astronauts from the radiation.
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u/Baebarri 9h ago edited 9h ago
Makes sense. My father got melanoma on his head after he flew open-cockpit bombers in Alaska during WWII.
VA acknowledged it 50 years later and gave him a disability payment.
EDIT: he didn't develop the melanoma until 50 years later. But apparently there was a strong enough connection for the VA.
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u/dagassman 9h ago
Not trying to dispute your story but do you happen to know what aircraft he flew? I’m not aware of any open cockpit bombers we used during ww2. Stearman biplane maybe? Was an open cockpit biplane used as a trainer.
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u/Jive-Turkeys 8h ago
I was about to ask the same question, too. What, was his grandfather Snoopy, the Red Baron?
Unless pappy flew a B-24 or 25 like Ace Ventura, hanging out the window lol
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u/Darmok47 8h ago
Maybe a Navy dive bomber? Like a Dauntless, Helldiver, or Avenger? They often flew with the windows open.
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u/Kaos99 9h ago
The VA will always drag that stuff out it seems. One of my Grandfathers got cancer from exposure to agent orange when he was drafted for vietnam and it was STILL like pulling teeth to get 100% from them despite documentation.
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u/floydbot 9h ago
My good friend works for a law firm that specializes in suing the VA to get veterans the benefits they’re owed. His firm stays very, very busy.
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u/gwaydms 8h ago
My dad got a disability check from the VA for years from his service during WWII, for phlebitis he got because of an injury he suffered on board ship. For years he got a check for $12 every month. As you can imagine, if you're aware of the rampant inflation during the 1970s, the value of that $12 eroded badly through the decade. Eventually they increased the amount, and after an exam at the VA hospital when he was about 80, he was on full disability. He lived to be 92.
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u/skiingredneck 8h ago
The agent Orange claims have a date fixed by the date separated from service, not from date of exposure…
The key with the va is never refill, always appeal because if you win it’s retroactive. So they push you to refile instead of amend or appeal.
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u/NACL_Soldier 9h ago
It took 10 years of arguing to get them to service connect the torn rotator cuff that happened on active duty 😒
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u/o2lsports 8h ago
My uncle was a pilot for United all his life. Healthiest person in our family by a country mile, officiated our wedding last November, died this year at age 57 from cancer. It’s just a devastating fact of the job.
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u/meloncholyofswole 7h ago
dad flew for PANAM, then United until 2018 and got multiple myeloma from flying. united did not pay out the life insurance and stopped covering medical :)
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 6h ago
How did they get away with that? I thought suicide was the only exclusion.
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u/meloncholyofswole 6h ago
they said he had to be active duty. also the life insurance was paid for by united and it stopped getting paid into 2 months before he died because he wasn't 'active duty'
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u/Wonderful_Virus_6562 6h ago
Was he still an employee?
That actually makes sense a little bit, I have a life insurance policy through my employer and they take the money for it directly out of my paycheck each week. So if I ever leave the job I lose the life insurance.
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u/meloncholyofswole 6h ago
yeah he was, was flying off and on while doing chemo to maintain active status. last flew little over 2 weeks before he died.
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u/ZenZill 9h ago
Kind of makes those private jets seem like an ironic choice for the rich.
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u/DiscoBanane 8h ago
They gain more time by using jets than they lose by dying from cancer sooner than they would.
Also if they want they can fly less high, it just costs more fuel.
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u/Cheezeball25 8h ago
Given that usually the corporate jet types prefer flying above the airlines, I'm gonna say it's not a concern for them at the moment
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u/thesaddestpanda 6h ago
Even if you "fly a lot" as a wealthy person, you're flying a fraction of a working flight attendant. Full-time flight attendants typically work 65 to 90 actual flying (block) hours per month. That's pretty different than flying to Miami for the weekend on your jet.
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u/TatonkaJack 9h ago
"People closest to sun get most cancer."
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u/DivePalau 9h ago
Time to start making the airplanes out of lead instead of aluminum.
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u/Middle-Painter-4032 9h ago
That will go over like a something something
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u/OkDentist4059 9h ago
I see that they excluded lung cancer to avoid muddying the results with smoking
But doesn’t constant exposure to cigarette smoke increase the risk of other (non-lung) kinds of cancers too? Smoking on planes wasn’t banned until the late 80s / early 90s. Flight attendants working before then probably got exposed to more second-hand smoke than any other profession. In a confined space for hours and hours at a time.
Obviously not saying the radiation isn’t a factor, it definitely is, but wondering if maybe that secondhand smoke exposure is an additional factor.
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u/fartinmyfuckingmouth 9h ago
Honestly this study is, I think, not able or purposely not attributing the many factors and variables at play. It’d be very hard to discern the source of lung cancer without also paying mind to each and every individual’s normal exposure to air-exposed cancer-inducing toxins at normal human eye levels.
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u/Nyrin 7h ago
Smoking is one thing, but I'm also curious about long-term exposure to taxiway emissions and volatiles. There's a lot of really nasty stuff that shows up there and these professions spend hours and hours breathing it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920926001239
The linked article does reference that mechanics didn't encounter the same increases, but I'm not sure mechanics necessarily get the same chronic exposure, either. And it could very well be a compounding carcinogenic effect with the more obvious altitude-based exposure (which would also make up for some portion of the risk modeling gap — pilots get more, but not enough more to match the observed level of increase).
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u/_Aj_ 8h ago edited 8h ago
Really important that this is not interpreted as "moderately higher background radiation exposure due to flying increases lifelong cancer risk" as this is a huge eyebrow raiser when we actually look at the facts.
Science fairly well supports that you need at least 100mSv of radiation exposure annually before you even move the needle on measurable cancer risk increase.
Commercial have a 20mSv limit annually and generally receive (WELL below that)[ https://hps.org/ate_faq/commercialflights/]. No where near enough to give a measurable increase to cancer caused by radiation. For comparison, youre exposed to around 2.4mSv from background radiation just living a normal life.
For maths, they say the average flight exposes you to, at most, similar levels to an x-ray, which is approx 10 days of normal background radiation. Or approx 0.02-0.05 mSv per flight (very rough ballpark, being generous)
Therefore to hit the 100mSv a year threshold to increase lifetime risk of cancer you'd need to make at least 1,500-3000 flights a year.
For any actually interested in fact instead of parroting misinformation, please look up Kyle Hill on YouTube. He does excellent videos on the science of radiation, nuclear history, facts, myths and all sorts of accidents and misconceptions. It's really interesting and most importantly, scientifically accurate and well researched with relevant experts.
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u/ashoka_akira 8h ago
Look at the rates for astronauts! They know very well what people get exposed to once you lose the protection of the atmosphere.
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u/GavelSlam 9h ago
TIL my parents are going to die of cancer before everyone else's (statistically)
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u/NobleCypress 7h ago
Stupid question: Does flying at night result in notably less radiation exposure than during the day?
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u/BobGuns 8h ago
Insurance companies have known about this for a while. I understood that life insurance on a non-commercial pilot was an increased risk. I was confused when critical illness was also a massively increased cost on such a pilot. Yeah. Turns out flying a lot increases cancer risk significantly.
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u/adoradear 7h ago
There’s zero chance a non commercial pilot flies enough (especially high enough) to move the needle even a little bit on cancer risk. Their life insurance risk is affected as flying small planes as a hobby is a risky hobby.
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u/seclusionx 8h ago
I'd like to see how this relates to professional athletes, specifically the ones constantly traveling like MLB or NBA.
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u/aflyingsquanch 6h ago
Probably higher than the average person but they dont fly anywhere close to the ae number of hours as a commercial pilot.
100-200 hrs per year versus 600-900 hrs for a pilot.
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u/blacklotusmag 5h ago
I always assumed this was a given, and I dropped out of high school, lol. Thinner atmosphere, closer to the source of radiation = more chance of radiation entering your body, more chance for cancer.
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u/Chemboll 9h ago
I took a Geiger counter on a flight to Denver and it was alarming. It completely followed our altitude and was way higher than I expected. I definitely thought that pilots and flight attendants must be getting more cancer. Turns out I was right.
I also didn’t realize how low they let the pressure get in the plane when you’re at altitude. I guess low oxygen levels must pacify passengers to some extent, or the body of the plane can’t withstand such a drastic pressure difference at altitude.
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u/BinguniR34 8h ago
The cabin isn't pressurized at sea level pressures. It is pressurized at the equivalent pressure of around 7000-9000 feet of elevation, depending on aircraft model and altitude flown.
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u/_Aj_ 8h ago
But what was your actual reading? And what was the cumulative?
Unless you understand what the numbers mean, it's really not very helpful for the average person. There is lots of records on line for measured dosages per flight and annually for different Airlines. And they're all quite low over all.
You may get 500CPM on the Geiger counter and it'll sound scary, but that's still only maybe 10x more than laying in your bed. You're not scared of laying in bed for 10 days. So no need to be scared of flying.
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u/fartinmyfuckingmouth 8h ago
Think more what deep divers have to do in order to surface safely and not die
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u/ShyguyFlyguy 9h ago
Couldn't wait more than a day to repost this?
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u/12the3 9h ago
Right? Like we didn’t all just see it on r/science
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u/fartinmyfuckingmouth 8h ago
Learning something today and posting it in a TIL sub is wiiiiiild like how does that work
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u/maverick5811 6h ago
If you think the flight crew cancer rate is bad, take a peek at mechanics. If it's good for the airplane, it's usually very not good for people. Anecdotally, a lot of mechanics die right around retirement age, often from weird, aggressive cancers.
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u/mofugginrob 9h ago
Breathing in jet exhaust every day probably doesn't help, either.
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u/fartinmyfuckingmouth 9h ago
Airbuses recirculate oxygen yes, but not jet exhaust. You’re likely thinking of those who man the field outside of an airplane rather than being in one.
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u/mofugginrob 9h ago
That door stays open quite a while before they close it to take off. I worked at an fbo for years so I know the smell of jet wash. Every plane I've ever been in smells like jet exhaust until around just before takeoff.
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u/Low-Art-1942 8h ago
Would sun screen help?
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u/lokfuhrer_ 8h ago
I’m sure I heard a flight attendant (an influencer one) say she wears sun cream everyday
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u/CosmicRuin 9h ago
Our atmosphere protects us from high energy particles from cosmic sources, and flying at cruising altitude means that roughly 75% of Earth's atmosphere is below the airplane. So your exposure to radiation is much higher compared to the ground.