Don't Trip: Radiation Levels of Milk in San Luis Obispo are Perfectly Safe

[IScreamSundays]

The California Department of Public Health says the low levels of radiation detected in a milk sample taken in San Luis Obispo County do not pose a health risk. Below is information updated yesterday from the department's Web site.

Q. Does California test milk products for radiation?

A. California routinely screens milk for radioactivity on a quarterly basis. Since the Japan nuclear emergency, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has increased milk monitoring to once a week in San Luis Obispo County.

Q. Has CDPH found radiation in milk?

A. CDPH sampled milk on March 28 and preliminary results indicate a trace amount of iodine-131 which does not pose a threat to public health. California's full report and data will be posted on this site on Friday. These results are in line with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tests of milk in the state of Washington.

Q. Does that mean that the milk is contaminated?

A. The levels of iodine were more than 5,000 times less than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration health standards. There is no public threat to California's milk....

http://www.ksby.com/news/state-says-no-health-risk-from-trace-radiation-in-slo-county-milk-sample/

[kenny blankenship]

1. Oh it's perfectly safe. Just don't try to take a quart of milk onto an airplane

Your 1 qt "radiological device" will be almost ten times over the 100 ml limit for liquids allowed to passengers boarding commercial flights - an aggravating circumstance that will loom large at your sentencing hearing.

[flamingdem]

3. Do you have an idea of the sensitivity of the dosimeters at airports?

I know you are mostly making a point but it got me thinking that they will probably raise the limits or it will overwhelm the TSA after a while if this stuff builds up here or on incoming passengers.

[kenny blankenship]

6. I have no idea about that sensitivity.

My goal is to avoid finding out, by avoiding air travel for as long as possible. But I imagine this could complicate things for them, especially as radiation continues to spew from the plant. There are some reports of shipping from Japan reaching European ports and tripping some kind of sensor/exceeding limits, and either being turned away, or told to stay put while they figure out what they're going to do about it.

[flamingdem]

9. Plus passengers coming from Japan have radiation on them

this happened in a few airports here, there is a thread from yesterday Radiation in Hair that goes into how a Japanese guy was told to cut his hair since it registered for radioactivity.

[suffragette]

10. Reports in Washington State about ship with radiation, too

http://www.kirotv.com/news/27292399/detail.html

Low Levels Of Radiation Found On Ship At Port Of Tacoma

Posted: 7:25 am PDT March 23, 2011Updated: 1:22 pm PDT March 23, 2011
TACOMA, Wash. -- Low, non-threatening levels of radiation were found on a cargo ship in the Port of Tacoma, the state Health Department told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.

The Hyundai Oakland from Shanghai arrived early Tuesday morning in Tacoma. Overnight, the ship was moved up to the Port of Seattle to continue offloading its cargo.

The Coast Guard boarded the ship on Tuesday as a routine security measure, and found increased levels of radiation in the engine's air filter.

~~~


The Coast Guard said the closest the ship came to Japan was 250 miles.

[flamingdem]

2. Maybe that's not the whole story: bioaccumulation in milk

I don't think it's cause for panic and it doesn't compare at all to the Japan situation but there factors to consider especially if you have children.

---
Radioactive dairy products: Tainted rainwater is going to make ordinary pasture grass and row crops slightly radioactive in all affected U.S. states, not just California - and even in parts of Europe and Canada. But the slightly radioactive water that will be soaked up via roots or via drenched leaves, resulting in very minor food contamination, will have the worst impact on the dairy product mix. Cows graze an enormous area of grass and accumulate fallout's iodine-131 in their milk such that the dose to the human thyroid gland from cow milk will be 1,000 times the dose received by simply breathing radioiodines in the pasture's air - this is according to a report in 1976 by two Berkeley scientists. This air-grass-cow-milk-human chain is worsened when rains deposit extra radioactive iodine to the ground because the grass in the 'air-grass-cow-milk-human chain' is that much more contaminated. Thus, the potential of elevated radiation levels in California dairy milk, especially for recent rain-impacted areas, should be a concern. This effect, called bioaccumulation, also applies (although to a lesser extent) to cesium-137, strontium-89 and strontium-90 in milk. In America's Cold War-era environmental radiation monitoring efforts, the presence of strontium-89 in milk was a high short-term health concern because this milk-to-bone traveling radioisotope emits very strong beta energies in internal organs.

http://www.idealist.ws/

[sharp_stick]

4. I think that's one reason

they test the milk for radioactivity as SOP.

[flamingdem]

5. What is SOP? nt

[sharp_stick]

7. Sorry, I'm at work

and we loooove them acronyms also known as TLA's for three letter acronyms. We actually have an entire database of them.

SOP is standard operating protocol.

My guess is that one reason milk is regularly measured for radioactivity precisely because it can bio-accumulate radioactive particles.

[PearliePoo2]

8. Standard Operating Procedure

nt

[alcibiades_mystery]

11. Don't bother

If the government says it's unsafe, those claiming it unsafe are correct.
If the government says it's safe, those claiming it is unsafe are also correct, because the government is known to lie about these things.

The bottom line is that you can't argue with paranoids. They have built-in mechanisms for being correct regardless of the empirical data. It is of the essence of their beliefs that they should be unfalsifiable. That's why it's considered a pathology.