The Sickening Mind: Brain, Behaviour, Immunity and Disease

Assuming this hypothesis is true, the Three Mile Island incident might actually have helped to save the lives of a few people who would have died had their cancer progressed undetected.

A second and more direct route by which the Three Mile Island accident could have influenced cancer rates is through stress-induced changes in immune function. The prolonged stress of worrying about the hazards posed by the damaged reactor might have led to an impairment in immune function, thus increasing locals’ susceptibility to cancer or, more plausibly, promoting the growth of existing, early-stage tumours.

The Three Mile Island incident was to prove a pale shadow of what took place seven years later in the Ukraine. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986 resulted in vast quantities of radioactive material being released into the environment. Thousands of square miles were contaminated and the inhabitants exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation which claimed hundreds of lives. Stress contributed to the problem, making an appalling situation worse. The official scientific report produced for the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency commented that there were very high levels of psychological stress even outside the contaminated regions.

Another nuclear accident that caused serious psychological and physical damage, albeit on a smaller scale than Chernobyl, occurred in Brazil the following year. In September 1987 an unsuspecting thief stole twenty grams of caesium-137, a highly radioactive isotope, from a disused clinic in Goiania, a town in central Brazil. Before the true nature of the theft was discovered, the strange substance which glowed in the dark had been handed around the neighbourhood. Tragically, 118 people were contaminated with caesium-137, of whom 4 died from the immediate effects of radiation. And, as at Chernobyl, the entire population of the surrounding area was confronted with the dreadful possibility that they might have been exposed.

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