🚀 go-pugleaf

Actually, Plutonium should not stay in your lungs for ever because your 
lungs produce mucous to remove the dust in the air. I have been told it 
stays in for a month or two. However, if you work in a Plut facility that is 
not ventilated, your could be breathing it in all the time. AJI

"Gregory L. Hansen" <glhansen@steel.ucs.indiana.edu> wrote in message 
news:cd4rif$m1s$3@hood.uits.indiana.edu...
> In article <LEjJc.44549$yd5.7244@twister.nyroc.rr.com>,
> daestrom <daestrom@NO_SPAM_HEREtwcny.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>>"Harlan Osier" <maya_egg@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>>news:89ec59b9.0407121648.7b99eb5e@posting.google.com...
>>> You can eat it and nothing will happen !
>>
>>Sure, encase it in stainless steel and it passes through the GI track 
>>about
>>as fast as your last meal.  And the steel shields any alpha.  But lodge a
>>'raw' chunk of it in your lung where it will irradiate lung tissue for 
>>years
>>and you're likely to develop a cancer.  Inject it into your blood stream 
>>(or
>>through an open wound) and it may find its way to some bone marrow 
>>(another
>>cancer).
>
> As I recall, according to the BEIR-IV, plutonium workers had been tracked
> for more than 50 years, and the risk above background is apparantly low
> enough that there's no epidemiological data that can determine it.  So the
> risk due to plutonium remains theoretical, based on extrapolation of
> animal studies and other types of exposures in humans.
>
>
> -- 
> "The result of this experiment was inconclusive, so we had to use
> statistics."  (Overheard at international physics conference)