Hiroshima and Nagasaki in numbersOn the 6th of august, 1945 an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Just three days later a second B-29 bomber dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The total estimated number of victims was around 120.000 however what happed after the blast was even more devastating.
Within the first few months after the bombings, it is estimated by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation that between 90.000 and 166.000 people died in Hiroshima only, and another 60.000 to 80.000 in Nagasaki. These numbers include the people that died from the blast or heat coming from the explosion. However this wasn’t all. The radiation cause newborn babies to be have mutated DNA and this caused the babies to have weird things such as a 3th arm. |
Leukemia |
Among the long-term effects suffered by atomic bomb survivors, the most deadly was leukemia. An increase in leukemia appeared about two years after the attacks and peaked around four to six years later. Children represent the population that was affected most severely. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation estimates the attributable risk of leukemia to be 46% for bomb victims.
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The years that followed |
For all other cancers, incidence increase did not appear until around ten years after the attacks. The increase was first noted in 1956 and soon after tumor registries were started in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to collect data on the excess cancer risks caused by the radiation exposure. Nearly seventy years after the bombings occurred, most of the generation that was alive during the attack has passed away. Now much more attention has turned to the children born to the survivors. Regarding individuals who had been exposed to radiation before birth (in utero), studies, such as one led by E. Nakashima in 1994, have shown that exposure led to increases in small head size and mental disability, as well as impairment in physical growth. Persons exposed in utero were also found to have a lower increase in cancer rate than survivors who were children at the time of the attack.
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