Re: the article about the contaminated fawn at Brookhaven lab

[AndrewsJP@AOL.COM]

This story by TAMER EL-GHOBASHY contains a number of missing elements.  1) The fawn was contaminated with RADIOACTIVITY, not RADIATION.  The reporter should know the difference.  2) The radioactive material was not identified, so no hazard judgement can be made of this information.  The reporter should determine what the radioactive material(s) is/are and report that as part of the report. 3) The units of radioactivity are incomplete not giving the unit of mass associated with the radioactivity in picocuries.  Such a number indicates that the activity, only a few disentegrations per minute is the total in the carcass, not per gram or kilogram. It takes trillions of picocuries to be significant.  Update the story to clarify this report.  


The report has been widely circulated on the internet.


John Andrews

Knoxville, Tennessee