French court rules cosmic radiation caused flight attendant's breast cancer
Radiation link in flight attendant's breast cancer, French court finds
A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a cause of breast cancer in a former Air France flight attendant, Sophie Lainault. The landmark ruling in Bayonne identified cosmic radiation, passive smoking, and night work as occupational hazards. Lainault, who logged 12,600 flight hours, can now retire early with full medical coverage. The decision paves the way for similar claims, and a Harvard study shows flight crews have the highest radiation-related cancer death rates among professions.
My dearest wish is that the decision encourages other women who up until now have not had the courage to take this step.
- imglorp
There's no doubt cumulative exposure is a risk factor as a population.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/pilots-flight-attendants-have-g...
But how can they point to one individual and say it's causal? Maybe they caught some radon. Maybe something else?
- Tade0
> Smoking was authorised on Air France flights until 2000.
I'm sorry, what? The first flight I took which I recall in detail was in 1995 and even back then the "no smoking sign" seemed redundant.
Guess it wasn't.
- dmwood
C'mon, man. The use of the 'attributable fraction' (AF) in legal cases about toxin exposure is well established, if not uniformly legally applied. Careful epidemiology routinely produces the `excess relative risk' of an exposed population to a specific exposure. From this the AF can be computed as ERR/(1+ERR). For example, for uranium miners in the early days of the nuclear program the AF for lung cancer (via radon in mines) was 60% or more. Large scale epidemiology for U.S. cabin crews is already past the planning phases. Naturally not much can be said about one individual's case (except via intrusive genetic testing for predisposing factors), but the AF permits at least a rational way of proceeding.
- fastaguy88
The idea that "courts" are equipped to address scientific questions is ridiculous. Perhaps French courts are better -- in the US, it is very much about decisions based on a confrontational presentation of "evidence", something like "debates" about evolution or vaccine injuries.
Debates are about persuasion, not reality. And, in some contexts (like whether you should go to jail), there is a process argument that there needs to be a debate-like process. Science deals in facts and statistics that have associated uncertainty. For scientific questions, there should be better decision making processes than courts.
- ChrisArchitect
Related:
Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants