of xenon. ^ a b "Details" . Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences . Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences . Retrieved 15 March 2011 . ^ - pp. 85-86, pp. 92-93 in "Radiation: What It Is, What You Need To Know" by Robert Peter Gale, M.D., Ph.D. and Eric Lax. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013. ("The correct number of Chernobyl-related cancers will never be known, in part because of the considerable uncertainties in estimating cancers and cancer deaths. Especially problematic is the controversy about whether very low doses of radiation, especially if given over a prolonged interval, increase cancer risk. There are other difficulties as well. For one, we do not know precisely what radiation dose most people received. People who were indoors when the radioactive plume passed received much less radiation than those who were outdoors. However, because most people did not know when the radioactive plume passed, they cannot accurately reconstruct their whereabouts at that time. Also, many people were evacuated from contaminated land at different times and thus received very different doses from ground and food contamination. Next we have the geopolitical reality that many of the exposed people no longer live in the Chernobyl area. Living elsewhere, even in other countries, they are lost to follow-up . The Chernobyl accident was relatively quickly followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, whereupon many people's lifestyles but perhaps not their lives changed, mostly for the worse. For example, cigarette smoking