2023-05-15 15:20:37
May 15, 2023
Between 1966 and 1974, France carried out 41 nuclear tests in Polynesia. Studies have already pointed to an increased risk of thyroid cancer in people exposed to these tests. Researchers confirm this risk, although low.
What are the consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in French Polynesia on the health of populations? Several works have already addressed this issue. Thus, thyroid cancer would be the most important risk. This is due to the amount of radioactive iodine released during nuclear testing and its active uptake by the thyroid.
In 2010, researchers from Inserm, the University of Paris-Saclay at the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health (CESP) in Gustave-Roussy compared the exposure to radiation of 229 Polynesians who had been diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid between 1981 and 2003 to that of 373 “control” individuals. This study carried out on the local population then showed a small increase in the risk of thyroid cancer in connection with the increase in the dose received in the thyroid before the age of 15 years. But according to the authors themselves, these results were insufficient to conclude “ in a solid way on the links between the fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests and the occurrence of radiation-induced pathologies ».
This is why they conducted a second work. Big difference with the previous one, they had access to the original documents of the internal reports of the radiation protection services, declassified by the French army in 2013 and relating to the 41 atmospheric nuclear tests carried out by France between 1966 and 1974 in French Polynesia.
A slight increase
They were thus able to simulate the radioactive cloud of each nuclear test, and estimate the dose of radiation received by the thyroid of 395 people diagnosed with thyroid cancer between 1984 and 2016. Thus they observed that “the nuclear tests carried out by France might be responsible for a total of 2.3% of the total cases of thyroid cancer”.
For Florent de Vathaire, Inserm researcher at Gustave-Roussy and main author of the study, ” these results (…) confirm that the nuclear tests are very probably the cause of a slight increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer in French Polynesia. However, they must be considered with caution because the estimate of the radiation doses received by the thyroid more than 50 years ago is necessarily imprecise.. »
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