IRPA 12 Congress Sets New Attendance Records!

The highlight of the IRPA International Congress (on radiation protection) opening is always the presentation of the Sievert Lecture. This year’s award winner was Christian Streffer, Germany, who presented an excellent lecture titled Radiological Protection: Challenges and Fascinations of Biological Research. Prof. Streffer began by outlining the limitations faced by epidemiological studies in providing low dose radiation effects information. He went on to provide an excellent review of recent biological studies at the molecular level that are extending dose effects information to lower levels than is currently possible through statistical studies.

The IRPA 12 International Congress in Buenos Aires, October 19 to 24 drew 1,336 radiation protection specialists from 90 countries and 1491 contributed papers. These set IRPA Congress attendance records for both national representation and total attendance. This success is due, in part, to significant support for participation of young scientists, particularly those from developing countries, by the IAEA and several IRPA Associate Societies. The IRPA 12 was opened with a welcome to Buenos Aires by the Vice President for Congress Affairs, Abel Gonzales. The traditional Congress opening was declared by IRPA President, Phil Metcalf with the ringing of the Polvani bell. The opening session concluded with a touching tribute to former ICRP Chairman and Argentina native, Dan Beninson.

Three cheers for the good work done by the IRPA for providing this platform for radiation protection professionals, world-wide.

IARP Conference, Defence Labs, Jodhpur

The Indian Association for Radiation Protection (IARP) will be organizing its 28th IARP Conference with focal theme of “Management of Nuclear and Radiological Emergencies (IARP NC-2008), being held at Defence Laboratory, Jodhpur during 19-21 November, 2008. The “Proceedings” of the conference is being brought out as a special issue of the journal, Volume 31 (1-4), 2008.

All the thematic areas in radiation protection are covered in the conference. The papers submitted were peer reviewed by experts. In all, 128 papers were accepted for presentation in oral and poster sessions, over the three days. The Proceedings is also being brought out as Compact Disk for distribution to the members of the Association. The information is also available in the IARP website: www.iarp.org.in

What is new in the ICRP site?

The work of two sub-groups of an ICRP Task Group is nearing completion. The reports of the Task Group will address:

1. Nuclear decay data for dosimetric calculations; and
2. Reference computational phantoms of the adult male and female (a joint ICRP/ICRU Report).

These two drafts, which are interrelated in the sense that they both provide data for dosimetric calculations, are primarily collections of tabulated information, in the first report to describe radionuclide transformations as an extension of ICRP Publication 38, and in the second report to describe the characteristics of the voxel-based reference phantoms referred to in ICRP Publication 103.