I. Blood Counts—Research or Routine?

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Abstract
In this country, the practice of performing blood counts on workers occupationally exposed to ionizing radiation stems from the Recommendations of the British X-ray and Radium Protection Committee (1931). This followed the publication in the previous decade of a considerable number of papers reporting death and disease in such workers from the effects of radiation on the blood and blood forming tissues. It appears to have been assumed that, by a biological system of monitoring through blood counts, serious and irreversible changes would be avoided. Mole (1954) has recently gone back over the literature of those days and attempted to find the evidence on which this supposition was made. He concludes that, though the evidence may have been sufficient at that time to warrant the proposal of the recommendation, the situation is altered today. Since then reliable physical methods of measuring the dose received by individuals have been developed and in his view they should supplant, not supplement, the biological method. This is an economically attractive view because haematological control demands a great effort in manpower by clinical pathologists and their technicians. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods. They can be summarised as follows: (i) They are extremely sensitive; it is possible to measure with a fair degree of accuracy doses down to about 0·01 r. (ii) They are easy to interpret; they are a straightforward measure of dose received.

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