CHICAGO - Health officials should collect blood from workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in case they are accidentally exposed to high levels of radiation and need a stem cell transplant, Japanese researchers said on Thursday. They said gathering blood from the workers would give them a ready source of their own stem cells that could help rebuild their bone marrow should they become exposed to high levels of radiation. "The danger of a future accidental radiation exposure is not passed, since there has been a series of serious aftershocks even this April," Dr Shuichi Taniguchi of Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo and Dr Tetsuya Tanimoto of the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research wrote in the Lancet medical journal.
(photo credit: The Jerusalem Post)