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Old 28th Jan 2012, 16:22
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Mac the Knife

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"Therapeutic and diagnostic X rays kill 60000 patients a year in the USA alone."

I don't know where you get your figures from but lumping therapeutic and diagnostic X-rays together is silly.

As you well know, these are very different things.

Therapeutic X-rays are virtually only given for cancer control and the vast majority of deaths are from the original cancer, not the X-rays.

In an authoritative 2004 paper in the Lancet - http://www.imre.ucl.ac.be/rpr/lancet-363.pdf - the excess lifetime cancer cases from diagnostic X-rays was 700 for the UK and 5695 for the USA - a bit less than your 60,000.

Mac
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