CHICAGO, (Reuters) – Health officials should collect blood from workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in case they are accidentally exposed to high levels of radiation and need a stem cell transplant, Japanese researchers said yesterday.
They said gathering blood from the workers would give them a ready source of their own stem cells that could help rebuild their bone marrow should they become exposed to high levels of radiation.
“The danger of a future accidental radiation exposure is not passed, since there has been a series of serious aftershocks even this April,” Dr Shuichi Taniguchi of Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo and Dr Tetsuya Tanimoto of the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research wrote in the Lancet medical journal.
A series of strong aftershocks this week has rattled eastern Japan, slowing the recovery effort at the Fukushima Daiichi plant due to temporary evacuations of workers and power outages.
Tokyo Electric Power Co said this week the situation at the nuclear plant, wrecked by a 15-meter (49.2-foot) tsunami on March 11, had stabilized. The crisis is now rated par with the world’s worst nuclear accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, although the total release of radiation at Chernobyl was far greater.
The researchers say transplant teams are standing by in Japan and Europe to collect and store the nuclear workers’ cells, but so far the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan is balking because it would cause a “physical and psychological burden for nuclear workers,” the team wrote.
Collecting cells from the workers has several advantages over donated cells, which require finding a matching donor and carry the risk of rejection.
