Estimation of radiosensitivity in pigs using body weight and an adjusting coefficient

To reduce the negative effects of radiation on animals inhabiting radioactively contaminated areas, it requires a set of activities, a key element of which is the regulation of radiation factors that is impossible without assessing the radiosensitivity of the organism. An integral indicator of radiosensitivity is the value of lethal dose LD 50, which depends on the species, age and physiological state of the animal unit. The number of papers devoted to the radiosensitivity of gross agricultural animals, including swine, is limited. At the same time it is shown on many animal species that radiosensitivity is reduced with the growth of live weight. This allows to assume that, for example, adult sheep and swine have the radiosensitivity to some extent depending on live weight, and the parameters describing the quantitative dependence of sheep death can be used to determine swine radiosensitivity corrected to the species features and live weight. During our investigation we analyzed the received experimental data on swine death after bilateral external experimental γ-irradiation, described mathematically identified quantitative dependence for animals with various live weight and compared the results with the previously registered for the sheep. On this basis the compensation factor K was developed, it quantitatively reflects the radiation power change when physically identical dose affects an animal of another species. Swine and sheep have the similar hematosis, that allows to use patterns, obtained on sheep, to study swine radiosensitivity. Multiplier value of 0.426 shows that at the same live weight, swine are less sensitive to external γ-irradiation than sheep. The adequacy estimation of the used mathematic approach showed that it allows sufficiently accurate description of irradiated swine death with the live weight from 30 to 114 kg. The resulting patterns can be used to predict the radiosensitivity of other species of farm animals on the basis of their live weight.