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Mushrooms And Geiger Counters

Posted by timothy on from the ticker-tape dept.

jonerik writes "This article in the New York Times details the efforts being undertaken by Moscow food inspectors to keep radioactive produce out of the city's open-air markets and off of dinner tables. And the efforts are paying off, with seizures of 'hot' produce up by 10% so far this year vs. last year. Laced with cesium and strontium thanks to the radioactivity released by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, forest produce (including berries and mushrooms) is more difficult to track than farm produce, but the inspectors apparently manage to keep on top of it, with one exception: Old babushkas who sell illegal produce from the sides of streets and who city officials are hesitant to crack down on."

7 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Mmmmm....radioactive mushrooms. by greenhide · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You haven't lived till you've had my grandma's Cream of Glowing Mushroom & Barley Soup.

    On a more serious note: while it is important to keep these sorts of foods out of the general population, I wonder what is being done to help those whose livelihood has up to now depended upon growing/gathering and selling these foods. If they can't sell the produce, they may just eat it themselves, meaning that they will be exposed to a greater amount of radiation than most people.

    This is probably one of the reasons they don't want to crack down on the babushkas.It would also be interesting to see what the public reaction to this will be...will more people seek out the babushkas to get the "good stuff"?

    --
    Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
  2. FYI by Brandon+T. · · Score: 3, Informative

    Babushka is the russian word for 'grandma' (it can also be meant as 'old lady').

  3. Risotto ai funghi by citizenkeller · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Yes, there^'s something to be said about mushrooms as natural geiger counters...

    When the Chernobyl catastrophe happened, I lived in Ticino (the southern, Italian-speaking part of Switzerland). Just when "the radioactive cloud" was passing over the Alps, we were in the middle of the local rain season. For a while, we received a warning not to eat any salad or other vegetable. Although this was probably somewhat an histerical reaction, to this day our mushrooms show heavy traces of radioactive isotopes, going back to that time.

    Quite a lot of plants and animals can be sued as bioindicators, i.e. natural indicators of some substance (usually a pollutant) in our environment. Lichens, for instance, can be used as a very precise measure of a city's pollution.

    BTW, "Risotto ai funghi" is a local recipe of rice, safran and mushrooms. If you are lucky enough to have safe mushrooms at hand, give it a try! You won't regret it.

    --
    -- Serge K. Keller
    1. Re:Risotto ai funghi by ceejayoz · · Score: 3, Funny

      Quite a lot of plants and animals can be sued as bioindicators

      Lets hope they've got good lawyers.

  4. None of this matters so much by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They're using the LNT model for radiation damage (find how much radiation it takes to kill 1000 out of a 100,000 in a population and how much it takes to kill 100 out of a 100,000 and draw a straight line.) The LNT model wasn't actually such a bad theoretical prediction before we found out that cells could repair genetic damage to some degree. Now that we know it (and have some further evidence from hard studies as well), the LNT-based safety models are known to be severely inaccurate. The Chernobyl death estimates that were based on the LNT model were also severely flawed.

    In fact, the only cancer spike that is commonly attributed to Chernobyl is an increase in thyroid cancer rates. Of course, two facts about the increase are rarely reported: 1) The rate of increase in adults is the same as the rate of increase in infants--unlike what radiation damage is known to do, and 2) the rate of thyroid cancer is very much lower than the rate in most western countries with modern medical technology. Could this suggest that what has changed is better monitoring of thyroid cancer, and not an increased death rate?

    Beyond silly (for the most part) mushroom hunts, does the LNT model cause us any actual harm? Well, yes, when policy makers use it to justify overblown safety standards on nuclear power plants that drive up the cost of nuclear power (and mean that we burn more Middle Eastern Oil). It's also the reason we don't have things like this: Project Orion.

    I am all for safety standards on nuclear power. But I want them to be based on the latest scientific data, not on out-dated 1940's guesswork.

    1. Re:None of this matters so much by g4dget · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The LNT model wasn't actually such a bad theoretical prediction before we found out that cells could repair genetic damage to some degree.

      LNT stands for "linear no threshold" (a threshold below which no ill effect occurs). The presence of repair mechanisms does not cause a threshold to appear magically: if radiation can kill at high doses with a repair mechanism, then it can kill at very low doses with a repair mechanism because repair mechanisms are not perfect.

      Now, in the presence of repair mechanisms, the curve might be non-linear: at very low doses, it might be easier for the body to repair occasional damage. In fact, there are very good reasons to believe that this is the case, and that kind of behavior was certainly plausible in the 1940's.

      But that doesn't invalidate the LNT model--the LNT model isn't intended as a best estimate of actual damage, it's an attempt at a conservative choice of an upper bound. Merely knowing about the existence of repair mechanisms doesn't affect that choice--if we wanted to make the upper bound more aggressive, we'd have to know a lot more about the behavior of those repair mechanisms than we do.

      Furthermore, we have learned other things since the 1940s. For example, we have learned that a single change in a DNA base pair can cause cancer or other diseases.

      I am all for safety standards on nuclear power. But I want them to be based on the latest scientific data, not on out-dated 1940's guesswork.

      Rest assured, it is. In fact, the latest scientific data suggests that nuclear power is overall not such a good idea--neither from a safety point of view or from an economic point of view. It's just that some people are so enamored with the technology (or have so much money invested in it) that they simply don't want to face facts.

    2. Re:None of this matters so much by g4dget · · Score: 3, Interesting
      But it's important to look at the standards as they are. Every mammalian cell suffers about 70 million spontaneous DNA-damaging events per year. (The LNT model was developed before this was known, of course.) Most of that is caused by oxygen free radicals

      Chemical damage is different from radiation-induced damage. The cell can anticipate when chemical damage is most likely to occur and have more repair enzymes at hand. An active cell, for example, is more likely to suffer chemical damage, but it also has more resources to repair it. And the cell may take special precautions to avoid chemical damage during particular stages of the cell cycle. Radiation damage, on the other hand, is completely unpredictable from the point of view of the cell. So, basically, the comparison with chemically induced DNA damage is bogus.

      I do agree that there is probably no point in reducing man-made exposure to levels significantly below those occurring naturally--that is pretty much the only solid data we can base a decision on. But as you point out yourself, that's where it is roughly right now. Beyond that, LNT seems like a reasonably conservative model for extrapolation--anything more aggressive at this point would be wild and dangerous speculation.