Word: strontium
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...major menace of radioactive strontium is that chemically it behaves too much like calcium. The human body must have calcium, especially for its bones, but it makes little distinction between calcium and strontium. So when there is strontium around, it picks that up too-and deposits it in the bones where the radioactive forms can do the most harm.* When doctors try to flush strontium out of the system, the body is similarly undiscriminating: it is likely to get rid of too much calcium at the same time...
Last week in San Francisco, Biochemist Arthur Lindenbaum of the Argonne National Laboratory told the American Chemical Society how he and his colleagues had tested a chemical that flushes out strontium selectively and spares the body's calcium. Used so far only in rats (no human victims of acute radiostrontium poisoning are known), the chemical is a tasteless yellow dye, the rhodizonate salt of either sodium or potassium. Lindenbaum and his colleagues dosed their rats with the mildly radioactive strontium 85, which, for the purpose of the test, served as well as its deadlier big brother, strontium 90. Then...
...Strontium 90 is the most feared of all the fallout isotopes. It has a long half-life (28 years), and the human body tends to mistake it for calcium, which it resembles chemically, and to build it into bone. As it disintegrates over the years, it may cause cancer by the effect of its radiation on tender living cells...
Since their last year's report, said the scientists, the world-average content of strontium 90 in human bone has increased by about 30%. The increase in young children, whose bones are growing actively, was 50%. The highest values were found in North America, the lowest in the Southern Hemisphere...
Young children have, proportionately, ten times more strontium 90 in their bones than adults, but so far the average is only about 1/150 of the MFC (Maximum Permissible Concentration) that was recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. The amount will surely grow, say the scientists. Even if no more weapons are tested, there may be enough strontium 90 in "the stratospheric reservoir" to raise the strontium 90 in the bones of children in the Northeastern U.S. to as much as 4.3% of the MPC. If weapons testing continues at the same rate as the last few years, the average...