-15But because of the great value we place upon human life and health, the BEIR Committee recommends the use of the linear hypothesis for the purpose of estimating health risks associated with radiation at low levels. Simply put, this means that for a given unit dose of radiation exposure, a given health effect can be expected and as the dose increases or decreases, the likely effect changes in direct proportion. One more observation is important to this topic of the health effects of radiation. A cancer or a birth defect which may have in fact been induced by ionizing radiation, that is, without the presence of the radiation it would not have occurred when it did, is indistinguishable from the same type of cancer or the same type of birth defect which has occurred spontaneously. is a full BEIR Report 46, 86. Until there scientific understanding of the human organism, the link between radiation and deleterious health effects is a statistical one. The ill effects are observed as an increase in the otherwise normal rate of gene mutations, chromosomal aberrations, and malignant tumors. Thus, if the normal incidence of cancer and birth defects in these Marshallese populations is the same as that observed in the United States, we can expect approximately 15% of the people to die of cancer and 11% of the live births to be afflicted with some kind of genetic anomaly. As a non ph at result of the radiation exposure at Rongelap, Utirik and