The pilots and flight attendants who help us travel through the sky might be taking on more danger than advertised. Research out today finds that people with these jobs have a noticeably greater risk of dying from certain cancers, likely due to higher exposure levels of cosmic radiation that originate from outer space.

Scientists with Harvard Medical School and others compared death certificate data across hundreds of different occupations.

Airline pilots and attendants were significantly more likely to die from cancers related to radiation exposure than other professions, they found, even compared to jobs where people have to intentionally spend time near radiation, like nuclear technologists.

This research suggests much more should be done to safeguard these employees from the harmful effects of cosmic rays, particularly in the U.S., the authors say.

“These findings support consideration of occupational radiation protections for aircrew members commensurate with their exposure levels,” they wrote in their paper, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Aircrew employees like pilots and flight attendants are already known to have the highest average exposure to ionizing radiation of any occupation in the U.S., with most of this coming from the greater amounts of cosmic rays seen at higher altitudes.

Ionizing radiation can trigger the kind of harmful mutations in our cells that can turn them cancerous. However, it’s proven surprisingly difficult to establish whether the added radiation exposure that aircrew employees face actually translates to more cancer deaths, according to lead author Vishal Patel.

“Prior studies have generally been cohort studies assembled one airline, one country, or one cancer site at a time,” Patel, a physician and health care policy researcher at Harvard, told Gizmodo.

“They tend to be limited by small numbers of deaths and by the choice of comparison group—aircrew are healthier, better educated, and more affluent than the general population, so whichever comparison you pick does a lot of the work.”

Source: gizmodo