Radioactive Baby Formula: 30.8 Becquerels/Kg of Cesium from Powdered Milk by Meiji

ex-skf.blogspot.com ^ | Dec 5, 2011 | Ex-SKF

[ransomnote]

The manufacturer will replace 400,000 cans of its baby formula free of charge.

The brand that radioactive cesium has been found is "Meiji Step", a formula designed for infants 9 months and older.

As the article by Sponichi below states, Meiji is the largest manufacturer of baby formulas with 40% market share. Meiji did its own testing and disclosed the number. Will other makers follow suit? SNIP

"Meiji Step", a baby formula manufactured and sold by Meiji (headquartered in Tokyo), one of the largest food manufacturers in Japan, has been found with the maximum 30.8 becquerels/kg of radioactive cesium by the company's testing. It is not known how radioactive cesium was mixed in, but the company thinks it is due to the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident.

According to the Ministry of Health and Labor, it is the first time that radioactive cesium is found in the baby formula, after the nuclear plant accident. Meiji will replace about 400,000 cans free of charge.

The level of radioactive cesium is below the provisional safety limit by the national government for baby formula (200 becquerels/kg). It has been pointed out that infants are more susceptible to the effect of radioactive materials than adults, and the Ministry of Health and Labor is to set the new standard for "baby foods".

According to Meiji, the effective dates of the baby formula that has been found with radioactive cesium are: October 4, October 21, October 22, and October 24, 2012. The effective date is on the bottom of the can.

Meiji is the largest manufacturer of baby formulas in Japan, with about 40% market share.

[ransomnote]

More at the link. A quote from the article:

Additional information from Nikkei Shinbun (12/6/2011):

According to Meiji, 400,000 cans of the formula were processed in Meiji's factory in Kasukabe City in Saitama Prefecture, whereby the milk was dried between March 14 to 20. The raw milk came from Hokkaido, which was processed before March 11. The company thinks that during the process to air the milk to dry, airborne radioactive cesium released from the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident was mixed in."

[Palladin]

You and I predicted this. Other FReepers scoffed at us.

Pray for the people of Japan, especially the children!

[ransomnote]

TigerLikesRooster has a good post up. Here’s the link:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2816578/posts

In it, the scoffers are still there, noting that the radiation level is ‘quite low’, that there won’t be any 3 eyed babies, ‘it’s barely above background’ and advising that people should not panic. NOTHING will stop the scoffers.

I posted a link on that thread to the 2nd of a 3 part series on the EX-SKF blog where medical experts in Japan discuss 6 bq’s per liter causing bladder diseases in Chernobyl region. http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/07/part-2-professor-tatsuhiko-kodama-of.html

Yes - prayers for the people of Japan.

[J Aguilar]

Quite disturbing, since the human body has 10 bq per kilogram only from the disintegration of Potassium-40, a beta emitter, as Cesium is. Therefore, that report forbids the parents holding their babies.

Another step forward by superstition.

[ransomnote]

Either you need to study and understand science better OR you are intentionally misleading people. Isotopes behave differently in the human body (Strontium is a bone seeker, Cesium is a muscle seeker, Iodine is a thyroid seeker etc.) so the identity of the isotope, it’s half life and other properties determine how damaging it is to the body. The isotopes give off different types of energy (alpha, beta, gamma) in different proportions and different levels of energy so that cesium is quite damaging and strontium even more so). There is no comparison between potassium in the human body and an environment contaminated with isotopes like cesium and strontium. Even your misinformation is misinformed - if you had been correct just this once - the existence of potassium in the human body doesn’t give the nuke industry the right to contaminate the planet with radioactive waste.

[ransomnote]

You fail to acknowledge that cesium emits a high energy gamma photon.

Here’s some reading that may help you come up to speed a little:
“Gamma Radiation
1) cesium atom; 2) one of the neutrons within the nucleus turns into a proton (changes color); 3) electron and photon of gamma radiation emitted Cesium-137 emits beta and gamma radiation. When it decays, it expels a beta-minus particle (an electron) and sometimes a gamma photon. It emits the beta particle when one of its neutrons changes into a proton. This changes the cesium atoms into an atom of barium. If, from the conversion, there’s extra energy within the nucleus, the nucleus sends out a high-energy photon—gamma radiation.

Unlike beta and alpha particles, gamma rays have great penetrating ability.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/dirtybomb/sour-nf.html

Cesium-137 is significant because of its prevalence, relatively long half life (30 years), and its potential effects on human health.
How can cesium-137 affect people’s health?
Based on experimentation with ionizing radiation and
human epidemiology, exposure to radiation from cesium-
137 can result in malignant tumors and shortening of life.
Great Britain’s National Radiological Protection Board
(NRPB) predicts that there will be up to 1,000 additional
cancers over the next 70 years among the population of
Western Europe exposed to fallout from the accident at
Chernobyl.
For scenarios involving nuclear accidents or waste
materials the magnitude of the health risk would depend
on exposure conditions, such as types of radioactivity
encountered, nature of exposure, and time period.
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/health/contaminants/radiation/pdfs/cesium.pdf

[ransomnote]

More for you to read, J aguilar:

The
half-life of
potassium-40
is 1.3 billion years, and it decays to calcium-40 by emitting a beta particle with no attendant gamma
radiation (89% of the time) and to the gas argon-40 by electron capture with emission of an energetic
gamma ray (11% of the time).

So that means it’s produces less of the damaging gamma that cesium produces.

and:

The potassium content of the body is under strict homeostatic control (in
which the amount retained is actively regulated by the body to achieve the normal range required for
system functions), and it is not influenced by variations in environmental levels. Hence, the potassium-40
content in the body is constant, with an adult male having about 0.1 microcurie or 100,000 pCi.
http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/potassium.pdf

So this means that the body will not take in more than a set amount of potassium whereas the human body will unfortunately take in more and more cesium. So you get the human body responding differently to the radiation - there are many such differences between potassium and the nuclear wastes produced by nuke meltdowns and this is why the government and medical doctors treat bananas and cesium differently.

[Royal Wulff]

And banana has 31,000 Bq/kg.

[Royal Wulff]

Oh sorry I screwed that up. A banana has about 15 Bq. Figure a typical banana weighs 100g; that’s 150 Bq/kg.

[J Aguilar]

I’d stay far away that hot spot at my local fruit store and buy bananas just one piece each time.

[Royal Wulff]

Well, don’t sleep next to your spouse either then, since the human body emits 12,000 Bq.

http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/physics%2010%20notes/HumanRadioactivity.html

[J Aguilar]

Look, this is pretty simple. Cesium-137 fries you with 0.5 MeV beta radiation 94.6% of the time, or 1.174 MeV radiation the rest of it, with a 0.6617 MeV gamma photon from the rapid decay of the metastable barium produced in the first nuclear reaction



However, natural Potassium-40 yields 1.31 MeV beta radiation most of time. No metastable produts releasing gamma radiation, but a gamma photon featuring 1.5 MeV in a tenth of the cases!



In addition, 0.001% of the cases (a lot of them taking into account the amount of Potassium atoms in our body) Potassium-40 surprises us releasing a positron, that is, an electron with positive charge: we are releasing antimatter!

The anhilition reaction between matter and antimatter yields another MeV of energy.

Portraying radiation as something alien to us is plainly a lie. We are radiactive, we release radiactive particles, even antimatter. In addition, our environment is radiactive: certain rocks, the cosmic rays... flying, or staying on a mountain increases our exposure to cosmic rays.

[ransomnote]

We are radiactive, we release radiactive particles, even antimatter. In addition, our environment is radiactive: certain rocks, the cosmic rays... flying, or staying on a mountain increases our exposure to cosmic rays.

_______________________________________________

Radioactive cesium is not naturally occurring. Note that people living downwind of the Chernobyl reactor suffered early death, genetic mutations and debilitating illness at FAR GREATER LEVELS than those areas not contaminated by radioactive waste AND YET all humans have small amounts of radioactive potassium in their bodies.
This attempt to portray the incompetence and lies that resulted in 3 molten cores in Fukushima as somehow natural and negligible is PATHETIC! The existence of bananas does not give TEPCO and the Japanese government to ignore the fact that Fukushima reactor melt downs have covered the entire island nation of Japan with damaging radioactive contaminants and continue to pour into the air and water damaging radioactive contaminants.
Is THIS really all the nuke apologists have left? Taunting people for ‘caring’ whether they get cancer or leukemia or early dementia and a ‘host of other illnesses’ documented by researchers still studying the ongoing death and illness resulting from the nuke industry’s prior devastating accident in Chernobyl? Why don’t you just threaten to hold your breath until we agree with you that nuclear fallout from molten reactor cores is ‘natural’ like bananas, ok?