LAUSR

I suggest that before writing his letter, it would have been prudent for Dr Jargin to first consider the title of my paper: ‘Overview of epidemiological studies of nuclear workers: opportunities, expectations, and limitations’ [1]. In other words, rather than reviewing the totality of the scientific evidence relevant to understanding of the risks to health posed by exposure to radiation, the paper was concentrating on the potentially important contribution to the science underlying radiological protection made by the large epidemiological studies of nuclear workers that have recently been published—the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS), the US Million Persons Study (MPS) and studies of the Russian Mayak workers. Of course, there are important results from other areas of radiation epidemiology and from experimental studies, but that was not the purpose of my paper, as should have been clear from a cursory perusal of its contents. Further, at the outset of his letter, Jargin quotes from the first sentence in the concluding paragraph of my paper [1], ‘Ultimately, it will be powerful epidemiological studies examining exposure conditions of direct relevance to radiological protection against low-level radiation exposure that will provide the most reliable evidence’; but the quote is incomplete and the sentence continues, ‘... on the appropriateness of the assumptions currently required to generalise from the experience of the Japanese atomic-bomb survivors acutely exposed to mainly gamma radiation.’ Such selective quotation does Jargin no credit. Let me reiterate the main purpose of my paper [1]: large epidemiological studies of nuclear workers have the potential to contribute substantially to knowledge on the health effects of low-level exposure to radiation. However, there remain issues that need to be carefully assessed, such as the accuracy of recorded occupational doses, especially those from the earlier years of operations at nuclear installations. Observational epidemiological studies need to be designed, conducted, and interpreted with considerable care, and the nuclear worker studies are no exception to this.