[1] The U.S. BEIR report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation states that "the collective dose equivalent resulting from the radioactivity released in the Three Mile Island accident was so low that the estimated number of excess cancer cases to be expected, if any were to occur, would be negligible and undetectable.
[3][4][5] One dissenting study is "a re-evaluation of cancer incidence near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant" by Dr Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina.
[11] Based on these low emission figures, early scientific publications on the health effects of the fallout estimated one or two additional cancer deaths in the 10-mile area around TMI.
[11] The following day, chemistry supervisor Ed Houser and radiation protection foreman Pete Velez received extremity doses while drawing a boron concentration sample from the health-physics lab inside the auxiliary building.
[14] The effects included "metallic taste, erythema, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, deaths of pets, farm and wild animals, and damage to plants.
[15] In 1990-1 a Columbia University team, led by Maureen Hatch, carried out the first epidemiological study on local death rates before and after the accident, for the period 1975-1985, for the 10-mile area around TMI.
[19] Subsequently, lawyers for 2000 residents asked epidemiologist Stephen Wing of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a specialist in nuclear radiation exposure, to re-examine the Columbia study.
This was based on radiation exposure information on 93% of the population living within five miles of the nuclear plant - nearly 36,000 people, gathered in door-to-door surveys shortly after the accident.
[27] In 2005 R. William Field, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, who first described radioactive contamination of the wild food chain from the accident[citation needed] suggested that some of the increased cancer rates noted around TMI were related to the area's very high levels of natural radon, noting that according to a 1994 EPA study, the Pennsylvania counties around TMI have the highest regional screening radon concentrations in the 38 states surveyed.