Since the contaminated cattle (with cesium) have been shipped all over the country here, and the news got out, people are starting to take measures into their own hands because it seems that the government is inundated with requests for radiation checks, but people want more.
Here is an article that may not make it to page 1 of your news, but it's important to know just what is going on here.
Japan Nuclear Scare Triggers Run for Radiation Checks
Reuters Health Information
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/22/us-japan-nuclear-inspection-idUSTRE76L1D120110722
Japanese private research labs with radiation testing gear have been flooded with orders for checks on food and soil samples after shipments of contaminated beef deepened public anxiety over radiation leaks from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
…
"It's ordinary households placing orders. It's your regular grandpas and grandmas who want to check if potatoes grown in home gardens are free from radiation before they feed them to their grandchildren," said Mihoko Kikuchi, president of the Environmental Analysis Research Institute.
Will wonders never cease?
ReplyDeleteYou know, John, there is really nothing we can do other than to monitor our health over the coming decades. If it's not a nuclear meltdown, it's carcinogenic licorice.
ReplyDeleteVery true Cam. And as we find issues, with the means available, repair them.
ReplyDeleteThe best of outcomes to you and yours!!
Respectfully,
I may be wrong but something I read after the nuclear disaster here was that even after Chernobyl the actual nuclear-related illnesses they can definitively pinpoint are a lot LESS than what they envisioned. Now it may be that the pool of victims was not followed well-enough to collect valid data (for whatever reason) or it may be that the effects are not as horrendous as initially imagined. It is hard to say. Speculation and fear is what we are basing our imagined future issues on at the moment because unless I am mistaken there really has been no controlled study of human exposure to this kind of radiation in the food chain. We have a lot of data from in vitro experimentation but as any true and honest scientist will likely agree, in vitro and in vivo are two entirely different beasts.
ReplyDeleteA terrible lesson, but hopefully we can learn from it and pass the knowledge down through our legacies. You have to learn somehow and education of real value is never easy.
Regrettably, we are talking about Soviet era Russia. In other words, it's a safe bet not all the info came out. The other key piece of information is how quickly and thoroughly the soviets were able to act. There was no arguing with them once they decided it was time to evacuate a town. So in their own way, they minimized exposure.
ReplyDeleteAs for the effects on the human body, it may be the availability of information on the subject has fallen into disuse with end of the cold war, and consequently general knowledge has suffered a subsequent decline. Just a thought.
Hope this helps.
Respectfully,