Word: strontium
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...movement got its start last year when portly Dr. Teiji Ugai, 63, president of Shizuoka Pharmaceutical College, was worrying over reports that the tea plant avidly takes up strontium, including radioactive strontium 90 (TIME, Oct. 27) and that port of New York authorities had detected radioactivity in Japanese tea. Shizuoka prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, grows more than half Japan's tea, and the industry was already ailing before radiation sickness...
...Ugai remembered that strontium chloride combines with tannic acid to form an insoluble compound. From this he reasoned that strontium, instead of being deposited in the bones to do long-term damage, might be eliminated from the human system if there was enough tannic acid present. It worked in Dr. Ugai's laboratory, where mice stored up 30% less strontium in their bones when they also got tannic acid. Then he found that a standard brew of green or black tea worked like a weak solution of tannic acid...
While poking around the Animas Valley, Health Service scientists came across a second, even more alarming danger. Vegetables grown by irrigation contained not only 'radium (from the water), but also surprising amounts of strontium 90, which could have come only from nuclear-test fallout. Peas ranged as high as 250 micromicrocuries per kilogram (2.2 lbs.); cabbages went up to 315 micromicrocuries. One sample of lettuce had 970 micromicrocuries. The reading was twelve times the maximum permissible level set by the Atomic Energy Commission...
...side, it is clear that the press can be used and can act to mobilize public opinion, or just to "sell" it for good causes. The best example, of course, is the promotion of the Marshall Plan. But there are issues--such as the discussion of "permissible levels" of Strontium 90--where reporters digging for the facts and not just for a story perform a considerable service, and there are even times when the President can use his press conference to great effect (though Cater argues that this American "Question Period" has fallen on very hard times...
...total amount of strontium 90 released to date, said Dunham, might result in 150 to 300 cases of bone cancer and leukemia in the U.S. each year from now until the year 2029-a figure he put in perspective against the 98,000 expectable fatalities caused in the same period by "other aspects of our defense efforts...