FRIDAY, March 25, 2011 (Health.com) — A few days after radiation started escaping from the crippled nuclear reactors in northeast Japan, internist Peter Galier, MD, began fielding calls from nervous patients some 5,000 miles away from the disaster.
“Media reports are talking about how these radiation plumes are drifting across the ocean to the U.S. and levels of radiation are being detected,” says Dr. Galier, who is based at Santa Monica–UCLA Medical"just outside Los Angeles. “A lot of people are very concerned.”
The eight other doctors in Dr. Galier’s practice have received similar calls—and they’re far from the only ones. Radiation fears, like the radiation plumes themselves, seem to dissipate as one heads east, but doctors all over the U.S. are reporting inquiries from anxious patients who are wondering how bad the radiation will get, whether they should stay inside, and if there is anything they can do to protect themselves.
Doctors and health officials unanimously agree that these fears are unfounded. Although trace amounts of radiation have indeed reached U.S. shores, experts have repeatedly stressed that these levels of radiation pose no health threat—especially when compared to the threat in the vicinity of the damaged reactors, where residents are being urged to take precautions.
All the same, some people in the U.S. want to be reassured. And their first question seems to be whether it’s advisable to takepotassium iodide pills to prevent radiation poisoning.
Earlier this week, Arch Carson, MD, an associate professor of occupational health at the University of Texas School of Public Health, in Houston, received a call from a young man who had managed to obtain some potassium iodide tablets—drugstores around the country have been selling out—and wanted clarification about the side effects mentioned on the label.
“Based on everything we know about that disaster, there’s no reason for anyone in this country to take prophylactic action,” Dr. Carson says. “The emissions are likely to be so diluted or insignificant when they get to this part of the world that it won’t matter. You would only use it if you were within a certain radius of a high concentration of radioactive iodine.”
Dr. Carson also points out that potassium iodide protects only againstthyroid cancer, not other potential radiation-related ills such as lymphomaor skin burns.
Herbert Chen, MD, the chief of endocrine surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, in Madison, has received two office visits from concerned patients. One was a thirtysomething woman who had been treated successfully for thyroid cancer two years earlier and wanted to know if the drifting radiation was likely to put her at greater risk for a recurrence.
He told her no. “The risk of thyroid cancer [from radiation] is negligible in adults,” Dr. Chen explains. “The risk is predominantly in children and doesn’t happen for 20 years. Also, the cancer is generally very well treated and not life-threatening.”
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