Exposure to everyday sources of radiation, mostly medical X-rays, raises the risk of cancer but not by much and there is no clear line between a harmless dose and a disease-causing dose, a panel of prominent scientists reported on Wednesday. The panel said that there is no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless.
The panel asserts that people should think twice about having unnecessary high-dose X-rays such as the full-body CAT scans.
The report from the National Research Council updates 1990 findings based mostly on survivors of the 1945 atomic bomb attacks against Japan, about 45 percent of whom are still alive.
