Towards a Long-Term Strategy for Voluntary-Based Internal Radiation Contamination Monitoring: Representativeness of the Monitoring Results in Fukushima, Japan

Shuhei Nomura, Masaharu Tsubokura, Michio Murakami, Kyoko Ono, Yoshitaka Nishikawa and Tomoyoshi Oikawa
Additional contact information
Shuhei Nomura: Department of Global Health Policy, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Masaharu Tsubokura: Department of Radiation Protection, Minamisoma Municipal General Hospital, 2-54-6 Takami-cho, Haramachi-ku, Minamisoma, Fukushima 975-0033, Japan
Michio Murakami: Department of Health Risk Communication, Fukushima Medical University School of Medicine, 1 Hikarigaoka, Fukushima, Fukushima 960-1295, Japan
Kyoko Ono: Research Institute of Science for Safety & Sustainability, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, 16-1 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8569, Japan
Yoshitaka Nishikawa: Department of Health Informatics, School of Public Health, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Konoe, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan
Tomoyoshi Oikawa: Department of Radiation Protection, Minamisoma Municipal General Hospital, 2-54-6 Takami-cho, Haramachi-ku, Minamisoma, Fukushima 975-0033, Japan

IJERPH, 2017, vol. 14, issue 6, 1-20

Abstract: Following Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident, voluntary participation, rather than mandatory, was adopted as the default scenario for individual radiation monitoring. We evaluated the representativeness of the internal monitoring results from voluntary participants in Minamisoma City, which is located 10–40 km from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Of approximately 70,000 individuals who were residing in Minamisoma City before the incident, a total of 19,263 residents (aged ?21 years) participated in the monitoring from 1 October 2011 to 31 March 2015. Based on regression projection techniques with the available data obtained from the voluntary participants, the modeled probabilities of radiocesium (Cs) detection in October 2011 for Cs-137 and Cs-134 were 66.9% and 52.9%, respectively, which declined dramatically within a year following the incident. The rate of decline had stagnated since mid-2012, and the probability was close to zero after mid-2014. Sufficient agreement between the modeled probabilities of Cs detection (for the whole population) versus the measured Cs levels (for voluntary participants) was observed, except for Cs-134 in October 2011, indicating that the voluntary monitoring participant group was a good representative sample. Our findings affirmed the clinical importance of voluntary-based monitoring as a screening and dose-assessment tool in a post-nuclear incident. Our study informs societal decision-making regarding the long-term maintenance of the monitoring program under the current low exposure levels.

Keywords: 2011 Fukushima nuclear incident of Japan; voluntary internal radiation monitoring program; representativeness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/6/656/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/14/6/656/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:14:y:2017:i:6:p:656-:d:102074

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().