Radiation link in flight attendant's breast cancer, French court finds

ddazhbog about 9 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on bbc.com

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imglorp•about 5 hours ago

There's no doubt cumulative exposure is a risk factor as a population.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/pilots-flight-attendants-have-g...

But how can they point to one individual and say it's causal? Maybe they caught some radon. Maybe something else?

gleenn•about 2 hours ago

My friend who is a Radiologist said all the older, more seasoned Radiologists don't have any hair that grows on their hands anymore. She said she was glad to get out because even if they provide lead bibs, the doctors doing emergency radiology type treatments were still exposed long term.

Tabular-Iceberg•about 4 hours ago

That seems like it would be the most important part of the whole article, and it was left out.

It’s possible that the standards of evidence in a civil case is low enough that they don’t have to demonstrate a causal link. Only that there is radiation in the air and that radiation causes cancer.

goodcanadian•about 3 hours ago

The article acknowledged that you cannot say for certain what caused her cancer. The court determined, however, that the increased radiation exposure qualified as a workplace hazard that increased her risk of cancer and was therefore a contributing factor. At least, that's the way I understood it.

aeternum•about 3 hours ago

This seems like pretty strong evidence that the Linear No-Threshold Model for radiation exposure is the correct model. Not great for the many companies attempting to revive the nuclear power industry.

ch4s3•about 2 hours ago

Not really. A round trip transatlantic flight hits you with ~0.06 to 0.1 mSv and a chest x-ray is on the order of up to ~0.02 to 0.1 mSv, so roughly similar. There's a reason x-ray techs stand behind a wall, you have a VERY small chance of DNA damage with each exposure and for most people that doesn't matter because you don't fly that often or get that many x-rays but if you do it all the time, your bound to have a high energy particle smash into the wrong part of a cell's DNA. This isn't an effect of cumulative small doses but rather rolling the same dice many times.

stackskipton•about 3 hours ago

What? Nuclear Power workers are exposed much less than flight attendants and everyone else gets more radiation from their occasional flight.

Yes, disasters are worse but most other power options are killing people in non visible ways.

aeternum•23 minutes ago

Agreed, but one of the key reasons plants are so expensive is to ensure that power workers are exposed to much less radiation than flight attendants.

The fact that even a small amount of discharged radiation can cause damage makes everything more expensive for those companies, not just design and certification of the reactor itself but also liability insurance.

arghwhat•about 2 hours ago

Whether the disasters are worse depends on your metric. The deaths from Fukushima was, to my knowledge, only a few elderly individuals who had stress-induced heart failures. And that's a worst-case scenario with corruption, old designs, complete negligence and dual natural disasters hitting the plant in parallel.

It seems absolutely silly, but even wind power kills more people per TWh produced than nuclear due to workplace accidents in installation/maintenance.

Also not sure why lung cancer from oil/coal air pollution would be less visible than hypothetical radiation-induced cancers.

EDIT: Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p..., accidents include indirect deaths. Solar is the only energy source that beats nuclear in safety.

weinzierl•about 3 hours ago

The radiation exposure caused by the flight is a known. Fraunhofer institute once had the calculator they made for Lufthansa (if I remember correctly) publicly available. You could enter flight numbers and it would aggregate your exposure.

webdoodle•about 4 hours ago

Speculation: Most forms of breast cancer occur because of bad protein production from a specific gene. My guess is this flight attendants breast cancer isn't from any known breast cancer gene.

fastaguy88•about 2 hours ago

The idea that "courts" are equipped to address scientific questions is ridiculous. Perhaps French courts are better -- in the US, it is very much about decisions based on a confrontational presentation of "evidence", something like "debates" about evolution or vaccine injuries.

Debates are about persuasion, not reality. And, in some contexts (like whether you should go to jail), there is a process argument that there needs to be a debate-like process. Science deals in facts and statistics that have associated uncertainty. For scientific questions, there should be better decision making processes than courts.

gib444•11 minutes ago

Is your comment based on the body of the article, or the title? The article explains right near the top that it was ruling on it being classed as an occupational disease:

> Sophie Lainault...sought to have her cancer recognised as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work.

> This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling...which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. The other two were passive smoking and prolonged night work.

Tade0•about 5 hours ago

> Smoking was authorised on Air France flights until 2000.

I'm sorry, what? The first flight I took which I recall in detail was in 1995 and even back then the "no smoking sign" seemed redundant.

Guess it wasn't.

gwbas1c•about 5 hours ago

A couple of things:

From what I remember as a kid in the 1990s in the US, smoking was allowed on international flights. It was one of those grey areas that happen when traveling between countries with different laws.

I've also seen a lot of jokes about French culture being waaay more "pro smoking" than US culture.

Thus smoking beling allowed on Air France until 2000 doesn't surprise me.

azepoi•about 3 hours ago

Up until 2004 you had to book a non-smoking rail-car in France. I remember having to book a seat in the smoking section because the non-smoking cars were full. Smoking was only being phased-out in high-school yards (for 15-18 yo highschoolers not only the staff)

Marsymars•about 1 hour ago

By some weird overlap of times/policies, as far as I can tell, Air France never flew a Concorde flight where smoking wasn't allowed.

(British Airways banned smoking on their Concorde flights in 1997.)

infecto•about 5 hours ago

Lots of Europe especially France is packed with smokers. One of those things you take for granted living in the US and once you travel abroad you realize how much of the world still burns tobacco and it’s everywhere.

kingstnap•about 4 hours ago

Italy too. It's bizarre trying to hop on the trenitalia trains while a bunch of random people are standing on the platform right in front of the doors trying to get a few last drags in before the train leaves.

Tade0•about 4 hours ago

I'm not American though and while smokers are everywhere here, I don't recall ever being on a flight where smoking was allowed, even though the one mentioned was a connecting flight through Paris.

dralley•about 4 hours ago

They've mostly switched to vapes now. It's still annoying, but at least it doesn't leave trash all over the streets.

Seeing the sidewalks / parks outside of the main train station in Prague covered in cigarette butts as an American tourist in 2019 was certainly something.

happyopossum•about 2 hours ago

> but at least it doesn't leave trash all over the streets

Last time I was in London I saw enough disposable vapes on the sidewalk to build a home-sized backup battery...

1-more•about 3 hours ago

I smoked less in Prague than in the US. I was addicted to nicotine, sure, but I was also addicted to taking a little vacation outside whatever venue, and in Prague (in 2008) you could smoke just about anywhere.

cubefox•29 minutes ago

> They've mostly switched to vapes now. It's still annoying, but at least it doesn't leave trash all over the streets.

Vape fumes also smell far less bad and are almost not toxic to bystanders.

Pompidou•about 3 hours ago

"loi Évin", from 1991, do not allow people to smoke in transportation. I used to travel air France and air Inter plane from 1990 to 2000. I never see anybody smoking in a plane.

ChrisArchitect•about 5 hours ago

Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49389524