🚀 go-pugleaf

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)