Someone is exposed to a certain dose of radiation. They get sick, and then they get better and feel more or less healed for hours, or days, or even weeks, just to then get worse again and then die. What the heck? Does anyone know why, and can you please explain like I’m five? Or twelve, tops.
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The major mechanism for injury in radiation sickness is DNA damage. Your cells use DNA as a template/blueprint for making proteins, the functional part of life. Information for protein synthesis is copied into a strand called mRNA, which leaves the nucleus, and the mRNA is picked up by ribosomes and translated into a protein.
Sometimes the DNA for a protein is read thousands of times a day, sometimes once or so every ~30 days. There’s a turnover time between a protein being made and needing more of it. If you’re dosed with just enough radiation to damage the DNA itself, but you aren’t using that region of DNA, the effect isn’t going to be apparent until it’s needed.
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