Think It Through
CNN is reporting that the EPA boosts radiation monitoring after low levels found in milk
Results from screening samples of milk taken in the past week in Spokane, Washington, and in San Luis Obispo County, California, detected radioactive iodine at a level 5,000 times lower than the limit set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, officials said.
…Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said tests confirmed the milk is safe to drink.
“This morning I spoke with the chief advisers for both the EPA and the FDA and they confirmed that these levels are miniscule and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children,” Gregoire said in a statement.
“According to them, a pint of milk at these levels would expose an individual to less radiation than would a five-hour airplane flight.”
Ah, Governor, How many toddlers take a “five-hour airplane flight” on a daily basis, as opposed to the number who drink a pint of milk a day?
Is there no difference between external sources of radiation, and radiation that is ingested and, in the case of iodine, concentrated in a small area of the body, the thyroid gland?
Did they mention that flight crews receive more radiation exposure in a year than workers in nuclear facilities?
FYI: at cruising flight levels in an aircraft you receive 6 µSv per hour. That is “microsieverts”, one-thousandth of a millisievert [mSv], which is the unit normally used in these discussions. The issue is that when you land the exposure ends. With iodine in food, it stays with you and emits that dose 24/7.
4 comments
Lovely… my daughter drinks a lot of milk. Wonder what to offer instead….
The worst of it is that the smaller, organic dairies will be hit sooner, and harder than the factory operations than feed grain and don’t have pastures for their cows.
Dry milk is probably out of the question.
We have detected it in Florida, and you know we don’t spend a lot of time looking.
Farmers do their best, and a lot of them are proud of not mucking things up with chemicals, and incompetents thousands of miles away negate all of their efforts.
“… and incompetents thousands of miles away negate all of their efforts.”
What? Oh. I thought at first you meant in Washington, DC.
GeeDubya’s USDA rewrote the regulations for the “USDA Organic” designation, and AFAIK Obama has done nothing to correct the rewrite, so you can buy USDA Organic milk at a premium price and still have no idea what you’re really getting… they aren’t required to tell you everything.
My recommendation: buy organics only from farms you know and trust from the good old days; those that were USDA Organic back when the phrase meant something are less likely to have changed their practices.
When I was in New York I had the option of buying milk from cows I knew, as they were on the farms of relatives who ran dairies the old fashioned Swiss way – grow your own feed on your own land fertilized by your own cows. That was as organic as it comes. They used crop rotation and kept their seed from year to year. The number of cows was determined by the acreage, the size of the barn and the number of kids in the family.
These days you can’t make a living doing that, but you can live. The milk processors don’t want to buy your milk if you can’t fill a tank in a day, and that is too many cows for a farm.
Labels tend to be meaningless in the corporate reality of the US. That’s why you should buy local if at all possible, so you know what people are doing to your food.