Therefore, no one knows whether radiation's carcinogenic effect will endure for the entire lifespan of the youngest irradiated group, or not. Many experts today assume that it will. We, too, use that assumption in this book. The A-Bomb Study is a biomedical resource of unique value. We will refer to it in later chapters also.
Some physicians seem incredulous.
Funded by the governments of the United States and Japan, RERF controls all the databases of the A-bomb survivors. The answer to this question has more than one part. Some may even occur immediately. The cases committed in 1940 and occurring by 1945 look clinically just like all the other cancers occurring in the years 1940 through 1944. The presence of the cases committed in 1940, therefore, has to be detected by epidemiology.