Re: Radium in eggs??

[Franz Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 21:31 28.07.98 -0500, you wrote:
>Radsafers,
>
>I would appreciate your help.
>
>I received a phone call from a chicken farmer at an egg production facility.
>He just had his well water tested (he uses it only as a water supply for his
>chickens) and the combined radium 226 and radium 228 was 21 pCi/L.  He
>wondered whether or not he should be concerned with radium in the eggs he
sold
>(of course excluding the activity in the shells).  I would think the activity
>in the eggs would be minimal, but I would like to hears other opinions since
>his facility produces 20,000 eggs/day.
>Please respond directly to me at: SSEKIRK@aol.com
>
>Cheerio,  S. Kirk
>SSEKIRK@aol.com  
>
>------------------------------------

Since I am not a veterinarian I do not know certain numbers like daily
water uptake of a hen and transfer from water to egg. But what I easily
found at my institute (food control and research) was, that at an average
12 % of an egg is shell, which mainly consists of calciumcarbonate. At an
average 100 g of edible part of egg contains 56 mg of calcium. Since radium
behaves chemically like calcium and follows calcium in the body mainly to
the skeleton I may conclude that it will follow in the chicken body mainly
to the skeleton as well and to some extent to the egg shell. Of this small
part an amount still some orders of magnitude lower might show up in the
edible part. 

So even without knowing the numbers mentioned above I am quite sure that
the radium concentration in the edible parts will be beyond the LLD of even
very sophisticated analytical methods.

For your information - not direct related to the radium topic - we found
shortly after the Chernobyl accident rather high I-131-concentration in the
yolk of egg, but not in the egg-white. Cs-137 was only found in very small
amounts. Sr-90 - another radionuclide with chemical analogies to both
calcium and radium - was hardly to detect.

Franz


Franz Schoenhofer
Federal Institute for Food Control and Research
Department for Radiochemistry and Radioactivity of Food
Kinderspitalg. 15
A-1095 Vienna
AUSTRIA
tel.: +43-1-40491-520
fax.: +43-1-40491-540