How does radiation poisoning kill you, and why does it sometimes take weeks?
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Primarily it kills you because it quickly destroys your bone marrow and the lining of your intestines including your stomach. Bone Marrow is responsible for producing blood cells, and you die from infection and hemorrhage. Loss of the lining of your intestinal tract results in infection, dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.
The 3rd major issue is damage to the cardio and nervous systems resulting in collapse of the circulatory system, and intracranial pressure caused by edema, vasculitis, and meningitis.
You are well and truely F***ed.
Radiation damages the molecules in your body. The most sensitive molecule in terms of both being fragile enough to easily damage and being important when it is is your DNA.
When damage is done to your DNA, it can usually be repaired if the damage isn’t too bad. It’s happening all the time, both due to background radiation and due to chemical reactions, and your body has mechanisms to double-check that it is correct and to kill cells that are malfunctioning. In severe radiation sickness, however, the damage is too bad for this process to work: the DNA is damaged so badly that it can’t function normally.
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In the slower deaths from radiation sickness, the DNA is damaged badly enough that cells can’t properly divide, but not so badly that all of your cells stop working at all. The initial damage, and all the cells that *do* malfunction, triggers a massive immune response that makes you sick for a little bit, but then you recover a little. Most of your cells are still working, so your body can recover some normal function. The problem is that you’re on the clock: as your cells die, your body can no longer replace them.
The shortest-lived cells are the cells of your skin and intestinal lining and your blood cells, so those areas get hit first. Since you fail to produce new red blood cells, you start to become severely anemic as your old red blood cells die. White blood cells are longer-lived, but to respond to infection they need to multiply, which they can no longer do. And this is doubly bad because the failure of your intestinal lining and skin opens you up to bleeding and infection. Your disrupted intestines stop you from absorbing nutrients and give nasty gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting.
You typically die of a mix of failures: internal hemorrhaging from the breakdown of cell linings, anemia from the lack of red cells, infection from the lack of white cells, dehydration and malnutrition from your failed intestines. This is a slow and very painful death over weeks to months as your body slowly decays.
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In more severe cases, the damage is so extreme that it disrupts function immediately and causes an immune response way beyond what your body can safely do. You go right to vomiting, diarrhea, mental confusion, and coma, and you die quickly as the severe disruption to your entire body disrupts its ability to support vital organs like the brain.
This death is quicker. In the most severe cases, you lose consciousness quickly and die within a day or two. In others, you’ll be in a bit of a fever state while your body fails over the course of a few days to a week.
Radiation poisoning causes damage by creating unstable chemicals in the body when radiation strikes existing molecules. These chemicals can cause damage to cells, especially DNA. Minor DNA damage can be repaired, but extreme damage caused by radiation can leave the DNA unsalvagable, killing the cell or at least stopping it from reproducing. Depending on the level of damage, different organ systems will start to suffer from the cellular damage at different rates. Major cell damage will lead to burn-like injuries (sunburn is an example of this) as large amounts of cells are killed by the body to contain the genetic damage. Deeper tissues are likely to suffer lesser damage. Organs like the heart or brain are unlikely to be severely damaged (except in extremely high doses), so immediate death is rare. Instead, organs like bone marrow and the digestive tract tend to be the most vulnerable to even minor genetic damage, which can cause anemia and malnutrition respectively, eventually leading to death in days or weeks if the symptoms can’t be treated.
Radiation is dangerous when it’s “ionizing,” which means a single particle has enough energy to “ionize” the atoms it collides with. That means knock an electron loose, which in turn means the bonds holding together the molecules it is part of break apart, which means it is causing chemical changes in what it hits.
DNA is the chemical in the cells in your body that tell it how to do everything, including reproduce new cells. It is also able to repair itself, but not without limit. If a cell’s DNA is damaged enough by radiation, it can’t function properly any more and it dies. Or, it fails to reproduce, save dies later. Or, it malfunctions AND reproduces, so you have new malfunctioning cells taking over – that’s cancer. Any and all of these can be caused by radiation and all can kill you in different time frames.
There are many types of electromagnetic “radiation” (light) ranging from heat to gamma rays. They can/do each cause different sorts of damage, but they all destroy cellular function and replication/repair mechanisms by altering your DNA’s structure.
The energy in a given form of radiation, causes the molecular bonds in your DNA strains to be altered and reorganize (think of it like tying knots in a smooth string). As a result, when they try to replicate and/or perform other genetic functions, such as gene transcription, they are unable to do so, causing the tissue to slowly die over time. Different tissues have different sensitivities to different wavelengths of radiation, but they all “mutate” your DNA at a fundamental level.
Ok. So radiation primarily causes damage by breaking up DNA inside cells (or by creating free radicals that also radiate stuff and damage DNA). DNA is the instruction manual in every cell and has instructions both on how to produce things the cell need, what the body needs and how to make copies of the cell itself (and do what the cell does in the body) and to make special cells (like red blood cells and white blood cells).
1. The first hurdle is just cells surviving at all. Really intense radiation can kill you in hours or days (by killing intestines and nerv cells). This is generally because so many cells die that you just fall apart (dying due to bleeding).
2. The next hurdle is surving having your intestines being damaged. Intestinal epithelial cells (the surface lining of your intestines) live for 3-5 days (because they have to be replicated fast so that acid and bacteria and stuff doesn’t kill you. Did you lose too many of them? You’re dead. If you get this kind of damage your nerve cells also tend to be messed up.
3. After that there is the problem of infection. White blood cells is a key component to surviving bacteria and fungus and all that stuff and they’re very short lived. This is an ongoing danger as even a weakened immune system can be dangerous. Even if you survive your immune system might never fully recover. Your liver also has to handle all the cells dying. If the liver becomes overloaded with wasteproducts from wounded and dying cells you die from organ collapse (first the liver, then failure cascades cause other organs to shut down as well).
4. Finally (for acute radiation poisoning) there are the red blood cells. Your red blood cells live for 115 days (on average), and they’re continually created and dying. So if too many bone marrow cells (the cells that make red blood cells) have been damaged to replenish your red blood cells you’ll get weaker and weaker over that period. There will also be a continuing problem with bleeding inside the body until all the small blood vessels have been repaired (and until platelet, another blood cell, levels are back to the point where blood coagulates as normal).
5. Once 120 days are past the acute phase is over, although full recovery (fully repopulated bonemarrow so that you once again make red and white blood cells in quantities that a normal person do) may take up to 2 years.
6. After that the main problem is cancer. With so many cells damaged there is a pretty big chance that some of them will have gotten past the protection system the body has against critically damaged cells replicating. Cancer will be a threat for the rest of your life.
Ionized radiation carries enough energy to damage and dismantle our DNA. When your body takes a lot of radiation the rays and particles (alpha,Beta and Gamma radiation) wreck havoc on your DNA
It takes a long time to die because it takes time for the damage to accumulate. At first your body will seem fine, but with a damaged DNA your cells cant perform their duties. Soon you will not be able to produce new cells and the current ones will start to die. Cell death sets in which eventually leads to multiple organ failure and death.
Radiation also kills your immune cells, damages your bone marrow and makes you very prone to infection.
Imagine atom-sized bullets hitting the DNA of your cells a trillion times. Things get bad when those cells are supposed to divide.
Also, imagine inhaling a speck of dust that is shooting out those bullets. Now a gun is stuck in your lungs shooting at your DNA and it’s very difficult to get out. It may be stuck there for weeks while you slowly die.
Ionizing radiation is the sort that kills. It’s called that because it’s powerful enough to hit an atom and knock electrons off it. That could break a molecule, or cause a chemical reaction that wouldn’t normally happen.
“Radiation poisoning” isn’t actually poisoning. It’s what we call it when someone gets exposed to enough ionizing radiation that the radiation has torn up molecules throughout a person’s body and makes them deathly ill.
It’s particularly rough on DNA in cells that were dividing at the time of exposure because those cells were busy unwinding their DNA into single strands to make copies, and were in a position where damage like a cut in a DNA molecule couldn’t be fixed. Those cells can stop working and just die. The cells of the skin and digestive system are especially vulnerable, also bone marrow (which makes blood cells).
It takes a while because not all the cells die at once, and those that survive keep trying to do their thing. The process of cells dying also takes a little time.
What happens though, is the bone marrow stops replacing the blood and making immune cells. The lining of the throat, stomach, and intestines dies and begins to fall apart. A lot of fluid begins flowing into the gut as the lining tears off and is pooped out; and blood is lost. The skin also responds like it got a terrible sunburn and begins to peel away and sores form. Gums bleed, teeth fall out, and the person starts getting all sorts of infections because they can’t fight them any more. Then, if the person survived that far, their organs fail.
Imagine a knitted sweater, it gets some holes poked in it but it’s still usable as a sweater, but those holes create loose ends and pulling on a loose end will slowly unravel the whole sweater until it falls apart.
Now imagine your dna is the sweater, the radiation damages it creating loose ends. Eventually the damage from the radiation will unravel your dna like a knitted sweater until you literally fall apart. Your dna is also very very long so sometimes depending on the severity of the damage it can take a while for you to unravel.
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