34:22
A study in the US has found almost 7% of all deaths among flight attendants and pilots were due to radiation-related cancers. With more ABC science journalist Jacinta Bowler joins us from Melbourne. Jacinta, hi there. So, can you tell us why there was such high rates of these cancers? Yeah, it was quite high. What the study did was it looked at different occupations, 500 occupations throughout the US using death certificates, about 13 million US death certificates. And doing that, they actually were able to see that looking specifically at radiation-related cancers, things like lymphoma, skin cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer, that yeah, flight attendants and pilots had much higher rates
than most other occupations, even more than things like nuclear workers. And the reason for that is something, they believe, the study has hypothesized that it may be something to do with something called cosmic radiation, which is something that happens more specifically for flight attendants and pilots as they are in the air more and they're exposed to it more. So, should passengers be worried about this? So, this is potentially, maybe if you're Taylor Swift or you're someone who goes on lots and lots of flights, but if you're a regular, even a frequent flyer, you are exposed to more of this cosmic radiation when you are in on flights, particularly long-haul flights, but it's kind of it'll be about the same as maybe a CT scan worth of
radiation. That's if you're taking a lot of flights across a whole year. It's only for flight attendants and pilots, air crew specifically, because they are in the air so much more that this is something that potentially needs to be looked at a bit more. So, cosmic radiation, Jacinta, only exists at altitude, does it? So, cosmic radiation is radiation that comes from outside of Earth, places like the sun, stars, things like that. Um, they really high energy particles that can hit uh, bodies or anything really. Um, on Earth, we're quite well protected um, from the atmosphere. The atmosphere does a lot of protecting. Um, however, when you are in a plane, you're much higher and there's less atmosphere to be able to protect you. Um, because of that, you
end up with uh, slightly more of this radiation being able to get through um, and that is what causes the increase in risk. So, how do we monitor this risk for air crews? So, um, experts that I spoke to about this one, um, they suggested that there's a couple of different things we can do. One of the big ones is to make sure that when we have um, uh, any kind of uh, air crew that has symptoms of potentially one of these cancers, um, they're very well monitored to make sure that this is something that potentially could happen. Um, there's also some suggestions that we could uh, have better regulation of our flight um, hours. You could make sure that you have a um, radiation meter um, on all
flights. Um, there's lots of things that you could do, but really we need more um, research uh, particularly in Australia to see whether this is something that's happening in Australia as well as the US.
