The Israeli government has announced that it will give financial compensation to former patients with ringworm who were given radiation treatment and who then developed cancer. In common with other countries, Israel treated patients with ringworm over four decades ago with high dose radiation. Now the Israeli government—while insisting that radiation was then a “treatment of choice” for the fungal disease—has decided to compensate these victims or their dependants financially.

The compensation results from a law passed by the Knesset (parliament) after a group of patients who had had ringworm showed evidence of a direct link between the radiation and their tumours. Money, in the form of one off grants or …