I just watched an anti-war movie “When the Wind Blows” (super disturbing 10/10) and wondered what was happening to the couple as a result of the radiation poisoning.
In: Biology
Short answer: radiation poisoning is death to a thousand cuts
Long answer:
Your cells have DNA, which is used as instructions to build and maintain everything in your body. The DNA is copied between cells when they divide, so while a few mutations (errors during copying) won’t likely do much, a lot will.
A large amount of strong radiation (ionizing for example) breaks the bonds in the DNA on a mass scale, which makes some instructions broken or missing. This is like normal mutation, but rapidly sped up all across the body
These rapid mutations cause cells to stop working, leading to an increase of dead cells and lesser efficiency of organs. It also increases the chance of cancer a lot.
Usually what happens during a nuclear fallout, is a long exposure to an increased dose. Radioactive dust is in the air, water is radioactive. All this contributes to the dose which leads to all the above.
They’ve been cooked. Like a microwave, except its actually high energy particles shredding your very DNA like a cheese grater instead of low energy radio waves shaking the water molecules until get things hot.
When a single photon (light particle) hits something, there’s an actual impact. That means if I shine a flashlight at you from behind, it (very gently) pushes you forwards. The more energy the photon has, the harder the impact.
It’s how your eyes work. The cells in your eyes wait for a specific impact strength that corresponds to red, green, or blue. Those, and most other photons you’ll see in your life, hit very softly, more like a tap.
Radiation, however, is photons that impact *way* harder than most photons. Less of a tap, and more of a speeding bullet. Getting irradiated is basically getting shot by a bunch of atom-sized bullets.
Now, imagine that your cells are like factories. What happens when a factory gets struck by tons of speeding bullets?
The damage is pretty random, and usually bad. Some things might get damaged a little but still be fixable, some might be beyond repair, and it’s possible the whole place needs to be scrapped.
Likewise, sometimes the damage is so extensive that the cell just dies. And if tons of cells around it meet the same fate, that part of the organ stops working correctly.
It’s likely that some cells either don’t get damaged at all, or can fix the damage. However, they might rely on other nearby cells for certain things. So they’ll become less effective at their jobs because they need things from nearby factories that have been shut down. Or if they do the same thing as some dead or damaged cells, they might suddenly find themselves inundated with orders, as their compatriots that would fill them are out of commission.
Meanwhile, sometimes the bullets hit only the anti-cancer mechanisms (those are well beyond ELI5), and the cell becomes cancerous. It’s actually pretty hard to damage a cell in exactly that way; however, with the number of cells that have to get damaged for the radiation poisoning to be noticeable, a few are bound to win the lottery that way.
Severe acute radiation poisoning will cause your cells stop reproducing all together as it wrecks havoc on your DNA, which contains the instructions on how to do that.
In other words, the cells in your body starts dying and rotting before you actually perish. And you’re not able to replace the dead cells.
🙂
Radiation poisoning is caused by ionizing radtion, which is high energy particles that are energetic enough to break molecular bonds. When they strike your cells, they rip DNA bonds apart.
When this happens at a large and severe enough scale, you have radiation poisoning. Cells need DNA to operate and reproduce. Broken DNA can stop the cell from working properly and even die, and serious enough DNA damage make the cell unable to divide correctly.
Certain cells in your body, such as the lining of your intenstines divide rapidly and have high turnover. These cells are most affected by radiation, because cells are most susceptible to DNA damage when they’re dividing, and certain types of cells are always dividing.
When you get radiation poisoning, those cells are damaged so badly that they die, and they are unable to reproduce. If this happens to say your intestines and is serious enough, at this point, you’re a dead man walking—even if you stopped all the radiation, the damage has already been done, and will manifest itself with a little delay. In a few days, when your intestinal cells are supposed to regenerate, they simply fail to do so. No intestinal lining -> a slow, painful death.
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