Radiation Exposure: Fast Facts About Thyroid Cancer and Other Health Risks (milk)

[LoZoccolo]

Dr. Brenner said the iodine pills were protective, but were "a bit of a myth" because their use is based on the belief that the risk is from inhaling radioactive iodine. Actually, he said, 98 percent of people's exposure comes from milk and other dairy products.

"The way radioactive iodine gets into human beings is an indirect route," he said. "It falls to the ground, cows eat it and make milk with radioactive iodine, and you get it from drinking the milk. You get very little from inhaling it. The way to prevent it is just to stop people from drinking the milk." He said that the epidemic of thyroid cancer around Chernobyl could have been prevented if the government had immediately stopped people from drinking milk.

Crops can also be contaminated. "I wouldn't be eating an apple from a tree close to the plant," Dr. Brenner said.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/14/radiation-exposure-fast-facts-about-thyroid-cancer-and-other-health-risks/

[senseandsensibility]

1. No coverage of this on the corporate media

except for on Rachel's show, which is where I learned it. Wonder why?

[cliffordu]

2. How about wine???/

I want to keep my wine drinking intact!!!!

[TheWraith]

3. Iodine-131 is not going to travel 8,000 miles across the planet in any relevent quantity.

Once again, for everyone who doesn't understand this: you are at far more risk from the fission byproducts of above-ground nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s than you are from anything that is happening in Japan.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Some of us--in fact many millions of us--are a lot closer than 8,000 miles.

We are also dependent on Pacific Rim fisheries and other local food supplies and water supplies. So if you want to be smug about the risks to everyone east of the Mississippi and on the far side of the world from Japan, go ahead--but even you-all are in danger, dependent on the winds, if the worst happens in Japan (massive fire sending all the nuke material from six reactors and six stores of thousands of spent fuel rods into the atmosphere).

This nuke disaster has been designated Level 6 already--worse than "Three Mile Island" (Level 5) and not yet "Chernoybl" (Level 7). But it has every potential of becoming worse than Chernoybl, which had only one reactor. Fukushima has six reactor cores and spent fuel pools, all packed closely together, all at great risk, several probably in meltdown, several probably with damaged core containments, two with blown out roofs (spent fuel pools open to the sky), another with a blown out wall, at least one spent fuel pool with no water on it at all (according to U.S. authorities), several fires already, several plants too "hot" even to get near and the constant threat of a general conflagration that could send all the nuclear material at this site (including #3's plutonium) into the atmosphere. Short of this worst-case scenario, we are looking at months if not years of on-going steam releases of radioactivity. And whether a tiny fragment of plutonium hits my lungs or not, giving me instant lung cancer, the long term consequences of continual puffs of radioactive steam from Japan, containing several highly dangerous particles, is the larger problem, with massive potential consequences to babies and children, in particular, to food and water supplies, to the already polluted ocean, to fisheries, dolphins and whales, and to people in general, and with potential massive costs--health care costs, higher food costs, higher fuel costs, possible nuke plant decommissioning costs and God knows what-all impact on the already severely depressed economy and on the welfare of this and other countries.

This is an unprecedented situation, in which sublethal doses of radiation in the clouds that swirl around the planet have UNKNOWN consequences--a planet, I might add, already gravely impacted by climate change and by pollution. How bad is one sublethal dose of radiation? Two? Three? Four? A hundred? How bad are the cumulative effects of this and other pollution? How about for someone who just beat cancer caused by atmospheric tests back in the '50s and '60s getting dosed again? How about the survivors of Chernoybl getting dosed again?

We really don't know, and to minimize the impacts that have already occurred, and the great potential of a worsening disaster, is crazy. The reality is this situation is very stark. And you can be in denial about it, and push denial on others--that is your choice. But for people in the path of the radiation releases in Japan, it is quite foolish not to take precautions. And for everyone on earth, it is quite foolish to go on thinking that nuclear power is "safe." It is NOT.