A health ministry panel on atomic bomb survivors compiled a final report Dec. 17 proposing a two-stage method to expand the scope of recognition for people suffering from related diseases with regard to their eligibility for government aid.

In the report drawn up at its seventh meeting since its launch in September, the panel of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare proposed looking at individual circumstances to assess whether survivors who suffered from acute symptoms such as diarrhea and hair loss shortly after the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be recognized as radiation casualties.

The panel also called for automatically recognizing, without individual checkups, survivors suffering from diseases such as cancer, leukemia and cataracts, which indicate the noticeable effects of radiation, its members said.