Hi, MJB,
My mother died of lung cancer - she smoked. My sister died of medullary cancer of the thyroid, also linked to radiation. I blame those damn x-ray machines they used to have in the 50's where you could see the bone alignment inside shoes. I was fascinated with them. Wonder how many years of rads I accumulated from them before I was 10? I believe my uncle developed a leukemia when he was elderly. My father had RA, knock wood, no indication of that. Don't really know of any others in my family.
Obviously, there are well proven genetic predispostions with breast, ovarian, and colon cancer. Other than benzene for AML and radiation for all leukemias I've been told there is no proven link to CML.
Does it really matter though? There doesn't seem to be much we could have done other than to avoid radiation and, perhaps, benzene. Today, of course, that's common sense. I can't help but think what many of the people in Japan today will be looking at 10 - 40 years down the road.
It's interesting to speculate on the 'whys', but I wouldn't want to waste much energy dwelling on it.
Pat