Effects of the Chernobyl disaster of caesium-137 in Europe) While the IAEA/WHO and UNSCEAR considered areas with exposure greater than 40,000 Bq/m, the TORCH report also included areas contaminated with more than 4,000 Bq/m of Cs-137. The TORCH 2006 report "estimated that more than half the iodine-131 from Chernobyl [which increases the risk of thyroid cancer] was deposited outside the former Soviet Union. Possible increases in thyroid cancer have been reported in the Czech Republic and the UK, but more research is needed to evaluate thyroid cancer incidences in Western Europe". It predicted about 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths, 7 to 15 Times greater
Caesium-137 assessing the age of sedimentation occurring after 1954. Caesium-137 is also used as a radioactive tracer in geologic research to measure soil erosion and deposition. Caesium-137 reacts with water, producing a water-soluble compound (caesium hydroxide). The biological behavior of caesium is similar to that of potassium and rubidium. After entering the body, caesium gets more or less uniformly distributed throughout the body, with the highest concentrations in soft tissue. The biological half-life of caesium is rather short, at about 70 days. A 1972 experiment showed that when dogs are subjected to a whole body burden of 3800 μCi/kg (140 MBq/kg,