IRPA-10: 10th International Congress of the International Radiation Protection Association.

The 10th International Congress of the International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA) was held on 14–19 May 2000 in Hiroshima. This conference is held every 4 years, a reasonable time interval that could usefully be copied by other international congresses, as it allows the development of new ideas and science for debate. Hiroshima is a bustling city, but also the selfstyled ‘‘city of peace’’. The conference centre is on the periphery of Peace Memorial Park, built on a site beneath the epicentre of the bomb. There are a number of statues and monuments within the park, the best known being the ‘‘A-bomb (Genbaku) dome’’, one of very few structures within a 1500 m radius to survive the blast and now a world heritage site. Each day the park receives hundreds of visitors of all ages and nationalities. The big issue at the conference was the debate on ‘‘controllable dose’’, a concept promoted by Roger Clarke in 1998, which has received much attention in the radiation protection community [1]. In 1999, the IRPA invited its member societies worldwide to comment on the proposals for major revision to the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) system for radiological protection. The outcome was a series of position papers from many member societies, including the UK Society for Radiological Protection, leading to a major debate in Hiroshima. The overall purpose was to review the current effectiveness of radiation protection and to provide input at an early stage to the ongoing work for a new or revised recommendation for the future. A full report of the debate was published in the Journal for Radiological Protection, to which the interested reader is referred [2]. It is sufficient to say here that the consultation process was widely acclaimed, that the basic principles of justification, optimization and dose limitation have proved sound and that in any review, defects and weaknesses should be corrected before introducing more radical change. Guidance on interpretation of the present system of radiation protection and means of communication with others needs amplifying, as well as involving other professional groups and the public. In summary, the radiation protection community received the Clarke proposal with interest but were conscious of the need to establish the existing framework more widely before introducing further changes. The proposals also threw up an interesting problem, not often considered in the past but becoming an increasing difficulty, namely that of language and terminology. Many different meanings and nuances can be put on a word in any one language, but the same word cannot always be directly translated into another language as the word may not exist or the concept is not understood. Traditionally, the conference opens with the Sievert Lecture and Award. Itsuzo Shigematsu (Japan) discussed lessons from the Atomic Bomb Survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He raised the possibility that the current survivors may reflect a resistant subpopulation that is not representative of overall human risk, and emphasized that radiation dosimetry remains essential for identifying an exposed population so that dose– response relationships can define the health risks of radiation. He pointed out that absolute risk is the fundamental index for assessing the frequency with which a radiation-induced disease occurs and concluded by describing the work of the Adult Health Study, which has been following a subsection of 20 000 survivors since 1958. Not only has this given data on emerging and nonfatal effects of radiation, but also on the ageing process in the Japanese population. The scientific programme was divided into 24 main topics, covering all aspects of radiation protection, from cosmic to underground, from medical to nuclear, from containment to communication with the public. The proceedings of this conference have been published on CD-ROM. This is a great improvement from before and Received 1 December 2000 and in revised form 29 May 2001, accepted 14 June 2001. The British Journal of Radiology, 74 (2001), 883–885 E 2001 The British Institute of Radiology