Re: More on baby teeth

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

>Not likely in the Miami area, mostly western and north-central Florida
>areas, as I recall.

In my Air Force days in Tampa (70's), phosphate for fertilizer was a major
industry, with huge plants on the inland side of Tampa Bay.

The coincidence of the analytical methods not accounting for radium and the
presence of the phosphate industry in the state where the TFP claims to find
the highest readings is too much to dismiss. Given the mobile nature of
American society and the questions about how much of the calcium and
calcium-like elements in a baby originate in the mother, "identifying" Sr-90
in south Florida gets very complicated (that is, if you care to resolve
issues that call the data into question).

And expanding tooth collecting to nationwide will complicate things further.
There are places in the western US  where people carry very high radium
burdens originating in well water, which could lead an incomplete analysis
to "find" huge amounts of Sr-90!
============================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu


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