out of 80. about 1 in 40 people will get cancer, in addition to the typical rates of 16-20 out of 40. different types of cancer take different times for them to appear: 2 years for leukemia to appear 20 or more years for skin cancer or lung cancer in utero effects on human development a 1 gy dose of radiation will cause between 0 and 20 extra cases of perinatal mortality, per 1,000 births and 0-20 cases per 1000 births of severe mental sub-normality. a 0.05 gy dose will increase death due to cancer 10 fold, from the normal 0.5 per 1000 birth rate to a rate of 5 per 1,000. an antenatal dose of 1 gy in the first trimester causes the lifetime risk of fatal cancer sometime in the child's life to increase from c. 25% in non-exposed humans to 100% in the first trimester after exposure. transgenerational genetic damage exposure to even relatively low doses of radiation generates genetic damage in the progeny of irradiated rodents. this damage can accumulate over several generations. no statistically demonstrable increase of congenital malformations was found among the later conceived children born to survivors of the nuclear weapons at hiroshima and nagasaki. the surviving women of hiroshima and nagasaki, that could conceive, who were exposed to substantial amounts of radiation, went on and had children with no higher incidence of abnormalities than the japanese average. infectious diseases resulting from nuclear attack it was assumed in the 1983 book medical consequences of radiation following a global nuclear war that, although not caused by radiation, one of the long-term effects of a nuclear war would be a massive increase in infectious diseases caused by fecal matter contaminated water from untreated sewage, crowded living conditions, poor standard of living, and lack of vaccines in the aftermath of a nuclear war, with the following list of diseases being cited: dysentery typhoid infectious hepatitis salmonellosis cholera meningococcal meningitis tuberculosis diphtheria whooping cough polio pneumonia however although what the authors describe are conditions already prevalent in many of the world's city slums, it is inconceivable why people would try to remain living in crowded conditions by reverting to slum lifestyles, during or after a nuclear war. as many cities would already be destroyed, with urban life, slum or otherwise, this would serve no benefit to inhabitants. there would be billions of disease carrying vectors, in the form of city residents, lying deceased in cities caused by the direct nuclear weapons effects alone, with the surviving few billion people spread out in rural communities living agrarian lifestyles, with the survivors therefore posing a way of living far less prone to creating the crowded slum living conditions required for infectious diseases to spread. moreover, as reported in a paper published in the journal public health reports, it is also one of a number of prevalent myths that infectious diseases always occur after a disaster in cities. epidemics seldom occur after a disaster, and dead bodies do not lead to catastrophic outbreaks of infectious diseases. intuitively, epidemic diseases, illnesses, and injuries might be expected following major disasters. however, as noted by de goyet, epidemics seldom occur after disasters, and unless deaths are caused by one of a small number of infectious diseases such as smallpox, typhus, or plague, exposure to dead bodies does not cause disease ... cholera and typhoid seldom pose a major health threat after disasters unless they are already endemic.