Word: calcium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fact is that antlers are superb collectors of radioactive fallout. Like bones, antlers are made largely of calcium compounds, and radioactive strontium behaves chemically like calcium. Deer ingest strontium with their forage. In slowly maturing humans, only a small part of the skeleton is built each year, and therefore human bone shows an averaging of strontium over many years. But a deer's antlers are grown afresh each year, concentrating in a handy package a calcium-strontium mixture that neatly records the prevalence of strontium for that year alone...
...Caesium 137, which is a genetic peril because it spreads throughout the body. ¶ Strontium 90, which affects the bones, especially of young children, because it is absorbed like calcium. ¶ Carbon 14, which has a half-life of 5,700 years and has probably risen in all living matter -3%-.6% since the beginning of nuclear weapons tests...
...years. The strontium 90 rise in the next 70 years will vary in each country. For milk-drinking Americans, it will average an estimated .16 rem (or roughly the present dosage from X rays). For rice-eating Japanese, whose crops draw in more strontium because their soil lacks calcium, the per capita increase will be nearly...
...infant's symptoms resemble those of agonized adult withdrawal: convulsions, no appetite, bluish pallor, heavy sweating, endless, high-pitched crying. Since a pregnant woman addict may look quite normal-and rarely reveals her habit-the doctor is likely at first to suspect other ailments with similar symptoms, e.g., calcium deficiency. Proper treatment may be too late to prevent fatal respiratory failure...
...Strontium-90 from fallout may be a greater-than-average danger to the aged as well as the very young (whose fast-growing bones naturally take up the calcium-mimicking element quickly). A group of Columbia University scientists found that in oldsters over 60, the strontium uptake appeared markedly higher than in their juniors aged 20 to 60, was concentrated in the vertebrae, the breastbone and the ribs...