Basal-cell carcinoma
Basal-cell cancer is a very common skin cancer. It is much more common in fair-skinned individuals with a family history of basal-cell cancer and increases in incidence closer to the equator or at higher altitude. There are approximately 800,000 new cases yearly in the United States alone. Up to 30% of Caucasians develop basal-cell carcinomas in their lifetime. In Canada, the most common skin cancer is basal-cell carcinoma (as much as one third of all cancer diagnoses), affecting 1 in 7 individuals over a lifetime.
Radiation hormesis
Assessing the risk of radiation at low doses (<100 mSv) and low dose rates (<0.1 mSv.min) is highly problematic and controversial. While epidemiological studies on populations of people exposed to an acute dose of high level radiation such as Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivors () have robustly upheld the LNT (mean dose ~210 mSv), studies involving low doses and low dose rates have failed to detect any increased cancer rate. This is because the baseline cancer rate is already very high (~42 of 100 people will be diagnosed in their lifetime) and it fluctuates ~40% because of lifestyle and environmental effects, obscuring the subtle effects of low level radiation. Epidemiological studies may be capable of detecting elevated cancer rates as low as 1.2 to 1.3 "i.e." 20% to 30% increase. But for low doses (1–100 mSv) the predicted elevated risks are only 1.001 to 1.04 and excess cancer cases, if present, cannot be detected due to confounding factors, errors and biases.