Radiation Poisoning

A common concern for all those who live and/or work in space, radiation poisoning is a sickness caused by exposure to dangerous doses of ionizing radiation.

Cause

Radiation poisoning (also sometimes called radiation sickness) originates when the victim recieves a large dose of radiation over a short period of time. (A "prompt dose" in technical terms.) While chronic (long-term) exposure to elevated radiation levels can indeed cause deleterious effects such as cancer, this is not usually reckoned as radiation poisoning as it takes a long time to manifest. This prompt dose can be delivered in a vareity of ways. It can be near-instantaneous, as in the case of someone who is caught too close to the burst of a nuclear weapon or a poorly-shielded atomic reactor which experiences a criticality accident. Or, the radiation source can be inadvertently ingested by the person and cause a gruesome death via internal bleeding. (Assassinations by this means are known from ancient history.)

The same dose of radiation can have different effects on different people, often expressed in statistical terms as the level of radiation exposure needed to kill a certain percentage of victims. E.g., an LD₅₀ dose is expected to kill 50% of people exposed to it.

Treatment

In the early days little treatment was possible beyond pallative care and hoping the victim's body could recover from the damage. In modern times, bionanotechnology can be used to effect repair of damaged DNA, enabling most radiation damage to be erased with sufficient treatment. Still, this is not a perfect method of healing--it takes time, and extreme cases of radiation poisoning may progress too fast to be helped.

Prevention

Proper precautions and shielding should ideally prevent all cases of radiation poisoning, but of course there are many cases of sabotage, negligence, neglect, etc. voiding these and causing dangerous situations. Some types of radiation, in particular gamma rays, are very hard to shield against.

Most posthuman and uplift species have increased radiation tolerance built into their genomes, as part of general adaptations to make them more suited for spaceflight than baseline humans. Such people will usually be able to survive (albiet with great discomfort) radiation doses which would kill an unmodified human. Some of these tweaks can be retrofitted into people without them via gene therapy.