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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Radiation and Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1554332
Recent trends in cosmic radiation exposure onboard aircraft: Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Japanese in-flight doses
Provisionally accepted- 1 Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
- 2 Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Hiroshima, Japan
- 3 National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (Japan), Chiba, Japan
nearly 2 µSv y -1 over the target period including the pandemic year (2020). This result indicates that the distribution of Japanese travel destinations did not change significantly during the pandemic period. In contrast, the population-average APCD significantly decreased from approximately 10 µSv y -1 in the pre-pandemic period (2014-2019) to 2 µSv y -1 in 2020 by more than 80%, corresponding to a reduction in the number of travelers.The results presented in this study indicate that the population-average APCD of Japanese in air travel notably decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, although the flyer-average APCD changed little. Continued studies will be performed to determine APCDs for the subsequent period and to discuss the overall effect of the pandemic on public health.
Keywords: Cosmic Radiation, commercial flight, Aviation dose, japanese, Per-capita, COVID-19 pandemic
Received: 01 Jan 2025; Accepted: 03 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yasuda, Motoyama and Yajima. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Hiroshi Yasuda, Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
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