The Japan Times/Bloomberg
As temperatures soared above 37 degrees on a recent July morning, schoolchildren in Fukushima Prefecture were taking off their masks and running around playgrounds in T-shirts, exposing themselves to a similar amount of annual radiation as a nuclear power plant worker.
Toshinori Shishido, a Japanese literature teacher of 25 years, warned his students two months ago to wear surgical masks and keep their skin covered with long-sleeved shirts. His advice went unheeded, not because of the weather but because his school told him not to alarm students. Shishido quit last week.
"I want to get away from this situation where I'm not even allowed to alert children about radiation exposure," said Shishido, 48, who taught at Fukushima Nishi High School. "Now I'm free to talk about the risks." Read More
Two Peaches in Greater Los Angeles found high in radiation In Los Angeles, on Friday, July 8th, 2011, two peaches found at a local Santa Monica market were confirmed to have sustained radiation levels of 81 CPMs, or greater. The market's background radiation was said to be about 39 CPMs. The two peaches, thus, had significantly high radiation contamination equaling over two times site background levels...
Eating Radiation Isn’t the Same as Flying in a Plane The danger, of course, is that ingesting or inhaling long-lived, man-made radioactive particles over a long period of time in our water, dust, soil and food is very different than being exposed to electromagnetic radiation from a television or cosmic radiation from a plane ride. Once it gets in the body, lodging in bones, glands and other organs, it can damage DNA and cells for a long time, significantly raising the cumulative risk of cancer. Radioactive cesium 137 alone has a half-life of 30 years, where it can remain in the body emanating radiation the whole time. The risks are particularly high for pregnant women, infants and children...
An Amazing Solution: From Chernobyl to Japan: Treating Radiation Sickness with Rock Dust
“Remineralization protects not only soil and plants from radioactivity, but humans, too. Supplying abundant minerals especially trace elements to the human body improves radiation tolerance, immune system integrity and radiation exposure recovery.” -David Yarrow, 2006
Many people today were not alive or do not remember the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. I remember it vividly. Just a few days after the disaster, I flew to Salzburg, Austria, to attend a banquet in honor of a very dear friend and mentor, the economic philosopher Leopold Kohr. He was receiving the keys to the city of Salzburg from the mayor and the pre-arranged banquet menu featured venison, mushrooms and berries— precisely the wild foods that had the greatest exposure to radioactive fallout. Years later I wrote a poem called The Chernobyl Feast which I read at a memorial service at Yale for Kohr.
Each day Austrians checked the newspaper to read the radiation levels of every food in order to make a choice about what to eat. The government recommended avoiding fresh foods from gardens and farms and instead eating processed foods that were packaged and canned before the disaster and were therefore not exposed to radiation. It was very eerie not to be able to eat the beautiful but invisibly and insidiously radioactive vegetables, fruits and berries in the gardens.
In the years leading up to Chernobyl, some dairy farmers in Austria were using remineralization as a part of their operations. They added rock dust to liquid manure as well as combining it with compost, thereby removing odors and greatly increasing soil biota. As a result, cows had twice the normal lifespan and produced much more milk. Amazingly enough, after Chernobyl, the cheeses that were remineralized (as well as biodynamic cheeses) measured no radioactivity whatsoever. Austrians would stand in long lines in order to buy these safe, remineralized products. Read More
