[ RadSafe ] Tobacco's radiation dose far higher than leaves at Chernobyl

[Maury Siskel]

Roy, can you (or anyone else on the List) comment on anecdotal claims 
that the polonium in tobacco arises solely from fertilizers used to grow 
tobacco? Has the obvious experiment ever been performed using (control 
group) soil never exposed to "artficial" fertilizers? I'm impressed by 
the impression that we still do not know exactly what in tobacco is the 
cause of lung cancer. Is this correct?
Thanks,
Maury&Dog          (maurysis at peoplepc.com

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ROY HERREN wrote:

>http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11974-tobaccos-radiation-dose-far-higher-than-leaves-at-chernobyl.html
>  Tobacco's radiation dose far higher than leaves at Chernobyl
>    
>   12:00 02 June 2007   
>   NewScientist.com news service 
>    
>  If nothing else, this should worry smokers: the radiation dose from radium and polonium found naturally in tobacco can be a thousand times more than that from the caesium-137 taken up by the leaves from the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
>  Constantin Papastefanou from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece measured radioactivity in tobacco leaves from across the country and calculated the average radiation dose that would be received by 
>