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RE: Ingesting Iodine Dangerous as KI Substitute...NOT
Jane Bragg wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Jane Bragg [mailto:janepbragg@EARTHLINK.NET]
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 6:28 AM
To: Shane Connor
Cc: radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu
Subject: Re: Ingesting Iodine Dangerous as KI Substitute...
Shane,
You are right tincture of iodine is poisonous. Several other aspects are to be considered, the low mortality of primary thyroid cancers and the amendability of such cancers to treatment and the natural prevelance of contained thyroid cancers and precancerous nodules. The question should be how necessary are iodine pills and treatments.
The public is being fooled into considering iodine as the magic pill to prevent radiation damage; not so.
Jane Bragg
Jane Bragg
=====================
When Shane posted his initial message, I went rooting around on the Internet and in my modest library to see HOW poisonous tincture of iodine is. Very little toxicity data is available, apparently because it isn't very toxic. What I found was that a lethal dose in an adult is around 2 to 3 grams, roughly consistent with Shane's figure of 30 mg per kg body weight. 30 mg of tincture of iodine is approximately 1 oz. Doing the arithmetic, for a 75 kg adult, the lethal dose would be approximately 75 1 oz bottles of tincture of iodine. It appears that the estimate of lethal dose is based on a few cases where individuals have tried to commit suicide using tincture of iodine, and sometimes succeeded.
Tincture of iodine is still widely recommended, by the military among others, as a way to disinfect water -- 5 to 10 drops per liter of water, depending on how turbid it is.
Massive doses of tincture of iodine can cause morbidity or mortality, but the same is true of massive doses of KI. I stand by my suggestion (which Shane's web site www.ki4u.com sort of endorses) that painting tincture of iodine on something on the order of 4 square inches of the skin is an alternative to KI pills.
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov
These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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