Word: calcium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...major menace of radioactive strontium is that chemically it behaves too much like calcium. The human body must have calcium, especially for its bones, but it makes little distinction between calcium and strontium. So when there is strontium around, it picks that up too-and deposits it in the bones where the radioactive forms can do the most harm.* When doctors try to flush strontium out of the system, the body is similarly undiscriminating: it is likely to get rid of too much calcium at the same time...
Last week in San Francisco, Biochemist Arthur Lindenbaum of the Argonne National Laboratory told the American Chemical Society how he and his colleagues had tested a chemical that flushes out strontium selectively and spares the body's calcium. Used so far only in rats (no human victims of acute radiostrontium poisoning are known), the chemical is a tasteless yellow dye, the rhodizonate salt of either sodium or potassium. Lindenbaum and his colleagues dosed their rats with the mildly radioactive strontium 85, which, for the purpose of the test, served as well as its deadlier big brother, strontium 90. Then...
...Contamination of food crops from strontium-90 fallout can be reduced by simply adding lime to the soil, said the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's Dr. Eric B. Fowler. His team found, in "Project Green Thumb," that plants growing in calcium-poor soils are avid for strontium: give them enough crushed limestone (which is 40% calcium), and they lose much of their appetite...
Strontium 90 is the most feared of all the fallout isotopes. It has a long half-life (28 years), and the human body tends to mistake it for calcium, which it resembles chemically, and to build it into bone. As it disintegrates over the years, it may cause cancer by the effect of its radiation on tender living cells...
Ewell explained that an excessive concentration of the calcium salts found in milk leads to the formation of kidney stones. "You will rarely catch urologists drinking milk," he added...