“Stem cells should be collected from Fukushima Daiichi workers in case they are needed for treatment” via the Los Angeles Times

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan should have their blood stem cells collected and stored in case the workers are exposed to excess radiation and require medical treatment during the shutdown and cleanup necessitated by the magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami that followed it, Japanese physicians said Thursday. Bone marrow transplants are a common treatment method for such exposures, but they can be time-consuming when a search has to be made for matching donors and the recipients then have to take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives. Storing a patient’s own bone marrow in advance could alleviate both of those problems, a team of five physicians wrote in a letter published in the online version of the journal Lancet.

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