Julie Burtt

• Master of Chemical Sciences
• Researcher at Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission

Purpose: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) Development Programme is being explored in the radiation field, as an overarching framework to identify and prioritize research needs that best support strengthening of radiation risk assessment and risk management strategies. To advance the us...

Background: Exposure to different forms of ionizing radiation occurs in diverse occupational, medical, and environmental settings. Improving the accuracy of the estimated health risks associated with exposure is therefore, essential for protecting the public, particularly as it relates to chronic low dose exposures. A key aspect to understanding h...

Purpose: The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework, a systematic tool that can link available mechanistic data with phenotypic outcomes of relevance to regulatory decision-making, is being explored in areas related to radiation risk assessment. To examine the challenges including the use of AOPs to support the radiation protection community, an i...

Background: The purpose of toxicology is to protect human health and the environment. To support this, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), operating via its Extended Advisory Group for Molecular Screening and Toxicogenomics (EAGMST), has been developing the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) approach to consolidate eviden...

Purpose Canadian Organization on Health Effects from Radiation Exposure (COHERE) is a government initiative to better understand biological and human health risks from ionizing radiation exposures relevant to occupational and environmental settings (< 100 mGy, < 6 mGy/hr). It is currently a partnership between two federal agencies, Health Canada (H...

Background: Decades of research to understand the impacts of various types of environmental occupational and medical stressors on human health have produced a vast amount of data across many scientific disciplines. Organizing these data in a meaningful way to support risk assessment has been a significant challenge. To address this and other chall...

Introduction: A robust emergency management framework can limit radiation exposures and effectively minimize the potentially devastating consequences of a nuclear emergency. We projected thyroid cancer risk resulting from two hypothetical severe nuclear accidents occurring at the Darlington nuclear power plant (NPP) located in Ontario, Canada. Me...

The linear no-threshold (linear-non-threshold) model is a dose-response model that has long served as the foundation of the international radiation protection framework, which includes the Canadian regulatory framework. Its purpose is to inform the choice of appropriate dose limits and subsequent as low as reasonably achievable requirements, social...

Purpose: In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) formally launched the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) Programme. The AOP framework has the potential for predictive utility in identifying early biological endpoints linked to adverse effects. It uses the weight of correlative evidence to identify a minimal set of meas...

Exposure to ionising radiation is clearly associated with an increased risk of developing some types of cancer. However, the contribution of non-targeted effects to cancer development after exposure to ionising radiation is far less clear. The currently used cancer risk model by the international radiation protection community states that any incre...

Radiation doses and cancer incidence among the population living within 25 km of three nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Ontario, Canada were investigated for the period 1985 to 2008 for radiation exposure and 1990 to 2008 for cancer incidence. This study design provided at least a five-year latency period between potential radiation exposure and canc...

The full text of the meeting report in this issue is given in the PDF file.