Leukaemia is four times more common in industrialized countries than in poorer ones. During the period 1955 to 1989, deaths in the EEC/EU from leukaemias fell by an average of 26% for males and 33% for females, with a greater drop in child mortality. This is attributed to chemotherapy. Over the same period in eastern European countries, the the decrease in leukaemia deaths was an average of 10%.
In the UK approximately 1,200 children each year develop leukaemia. Studies have shown a link between both ionizing and non-ionizing radiation and childhood cancers, raising the possibility that workers' sperm was damaged and could produce children with leukaemia. Excessive incidence of cancer have been reported in proximity to nuclear installations. Such clusters have been shown to be real and not the result of chance. Leukaemia clusters have also been shown to be associated with incidence of population movement, even where there are no nuclear installations. There are also suggestions that men who received more than 100 millisieverts of radiation over a lifetime, especially if they had been exposed in the six months prior to conception, had 6 to 8 times the possibility of producing a child with leukaemia because of mutation of sperm.
If radiation is causing leukaemia in children, it is doing so with doses which are too low to measure. Although radiation is a logical candidate, as yet no adequate proof has been forthcoming. Known radiation charges into the sea or air have not been sufficient to to cause cancers. Studies of survivors of the atomic bomb explosions in Japan have found no evidence that it was possible to pass cancer to subsequent generations through damaged sperm.