Japan says WHO report on cancer risk at Fukushima creates fears

Tokyo, Japan (4E) – Japan said that the warnings by the World Health Organization of an increase in the risk of cancer for people in Fukushima were creating fears.

According to an article in a Japanese media outfit, WHO said the 2011 nuclear disaster had raised the cancer threat for people living near the plant, which emitted radiation when reactors went into meltdown after a tsunami.

However Japan’s environment ministry did not like the report and that the aganecy overstated the risk.

On Thursday, the WHO said rates of thyroid cancer among women who were exposed to radiation as infants within a 20-kilometer radius of the plant were expected to be up to 1.25%.

This represented a 70% increase over the baseline risk of thyroid cancer over a Japanese woman’s lifetime, which is 0.75%, the U.N. health agency noted.

The ministry said that WHO’s report was based on the assumption that people continued living inside the evacuation zone and ate banned food.

The government ordered hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate from a no-go zone and banned sales of food from the area containing high levels of radiation.

Many remain in temporary housing amid warnings that some areas could be out of bounds for decades, or even indefinitely.

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