We neither need to be hysterical with this nor to call it
idiotic. It’s evident that we’d better avoid radiations as much as possible, moreover of their bioaccumulation in the food chain, which happens exactly like for organochlorine pesticides and dangerous organic molecules in cooked food.
Of course some people can survive high doses of radiations without ever having any health troubles. The incidence is statistical and is difficult to distinguish from other causes as stated in the second quote below, which rightly mentions diet amongst other factors. Cooked, Neolithic and modern foods are very probably and by far the main cause. At least theoretically, a proper 100% raw paleo diet is the best bet to maintain our immune system able to destroy all cancer cells which constantly appear in our body.
We would probably be right to guess that eating raw such a wild boar contaminated with cesium 137 to the level mentioned in the article is less dangerous than eating a cooked non-contaminated counterpart.
Radiation-induced cancer
Exposure to ionizing radiation is known to increase the future incidence of cancer, particularly leukemia. The mechanism by which this occurs is well understood, but quantitative models predicting the level of risk remain controversial. The most widely accepted model posits that the incidence of cancers due to ionizing radiation increases linearly with effective radiation dose at a rate of 5.5% per sievert.[3] If the linear model is correct, then natural background radiation is the most hazardous source of radiation to general public health, followed by medical imaging as a close second.
Cancer is a stochastic effect of radiation, meaning that it only has a probability of occurrence, as opposed to deterministic effects which always happen over a certain dose threshold. The consensus of the nuclear industry, nuclear regulators, and governments, is that the incidence of cancers due to ionizing radiation can be modeled as increasing linearly with effective radiation dose at a rate of 5.5% per sievert.[3] Individual studies, alternate models, and earlier versions of the industry consensus have produced other risk estimates scattered around this consensus model. There is general agreement that the risk is much higher for infants and fetuses than adults, higher for the middle-aged than for seniors, and higher for women than for men, though there is no quantitative consensus about this.[25][26] This model is widely accepted for external radiation, but its application to internal contamination is disputed. For example, the model fails to account for the low rates of cancer in early workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory who were exposed to plutonium dust, and the high rates of thyroid cancer in children following the Chernobyl accident, both of which were internal exposure events. The European Committee on Radiation Risk calls the ICRP model "fatally flawed" when it comes to internal exposure.[27]
Radiation Exposure and Cancer
The associations between radiation exposure and cancer are mostly based on populations exposed to relatively high levels of ionizing radiation (e.g., Japanese atomic bomb survivors and recipients of selected diagnostic or therapeutic medical procedures). Cancers associated with high dose exposure include leukemia, breast, bladder, colon, liver, lung, esophagus, ovarian, multiple myeloma, and stomach cancers. Literature from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also suggests a possible association between ionizing radiation exposure and prostate, nasal cavity/sinus, pharyngeal and laryngeal, and pancreatic cancers.
Those cancers that may develop as a result of radiation exposure are indistinguishable from those that occur naturally or as a result of exposure to other chemical carcinogens. Furthermore, literature from the National Cancer Institute indicates that other chemical and physical hazards and lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, alcohol consumption, and diet) significantly contribute to many of these same diseases.
Although radiation may cause cancer at high doses and high dose rates, public health data do not absolutely establish the occurrence of cancer following exposure to low doses and dose rates — below about 10,000 mrem (100 mSv). Studies of occupational workers who are chronically exposed to low levels of radiation above normal background have shown no adverse biological effects. Even so, the radiation protection community conservatively assumes that any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, and that the risk is higher for higher radiation exposures.
A linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response relationship is used to describe the relationship between radiation dose and the occurrence of cancer. This dose-response model suggests that any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) accepts the LNT hypothesis as a conservative model for estimating radiation risk.
