4. Health effects of ionizing radiation

The effects of radiation can be classified into two main families, each with fundamentally different characteristics. The effects of the first family appear in all cases, as soon as the dose exceeds a certain value, and their severity generally increases with the dose received; they are threshold effects, non-random and dependent on the nature of the tissues, called for this reason deterministic effects . These effects are the consequence of cell death; they occur when too many cells in the same organ are destroyed, and clinically or biologically detectable effects appear....