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Bennett S. Greenspan, MD
University of Rochester (NY) Medical Center

JAMA. 1991;266(5):653.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The recent article by Wing et al¹ concluded that there is an increased incidence of leukemia due to occupational radiation exposure at fairly low levels. I believe that there are several major reasons why this conclusion is incorrect and, in fact, unsupported by the data in the article.

First, there were only 28 cases of leukemia, and the distribution of cases may have been due in large measure to the problem of small numbers. Second, the conclusion is inconsistent with virtually all other data in the field, some of which involve many more cases. Leukemias have supposedly been produced at far lower exposure rates than in other exposed populations, and the latent periods here are inconsistent with those generally seen for leukemia (minimum, 2 years; peak, 5 years) and for solid tumors (10 to 40 + years).

This radiation exposure is comparable to background levels over a . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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