Fallout Remedy?

The major menace of radioactive strontium is that chemically it behaves too much like calcium. The human body must have calcium, especially for its bones, but it makes little distinction between calcium and strontium. So when there is strontium around, it picks that up too--and deposits it in the bones where the radioactive forms can do the most harm.* When doctors try to flush strontium out of the system, the body is similarly undiscriminating: it is likely to get rid of too much calcium at the same time.

Last week in San Francisco, Biochemist Arthur Lindenbaum of the Argonne National Laboratory told the American Chemical Society how he and his colleagues had tested a chemical that flushes out strontium selectively and spares the body's calcium. Used so far only in rats (no human victims of acute radiostrontium poisoning are known), the chemical is a tasteless yellow dye, the rhodizonate salt of either sodium or potassium. Lindenbaum and his colleagues dosed their rats with the mildly radioactive strontium 85, which, for the purpose of the test, served as well as its deadlier big brother, strontium 90. Then the rats got the rhodizonate in moderate-to-huge doses every which way: intravenously, by injection into the peritoneal cavity, by stomach tube, and in their drinking water.

Alone, the big doses proved moderately poisonous, but this effect was checked by simultaneously giving the rats a diuretic, acetazoleamide (trade name: Diamox). Then, depending on how it was given, the rhodizonate picked up 20% to 40% of the radiostrontium so that it was flushed out in body wastes within 24 hours--provided the rats were kept foodless. Next problem, said Lindenbaum, is to find out whether fasting is necessary for rhodizonate to work, or whether there is a way to get around this. Either way, he was confident that rhodizonate, which human subjects could take by mouth at the first threat of radiostrontium exposure, offers an encouraging lead toward overcoming the most dangerous hazard of fallout radiation.

Other reports on radiostrontium:

P: Contamination of food crops from strontium-90 fallout can be reduced by simply adding lime to the soil, said the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's Dr. Eric B. Fowler. His team found, in "Project Green Thumb," that plants growing in calcium-poor soils are avid for strontium: give them enough crushed limestone (which is 40% calcium), and they lose much of their appetite for it.

P: Strontium-90 from fallout may be a greater-than-average danger to the aged as well as the very young (whose fast-growing bones naturally take up the calcium-mimicking element quickly). A group of Columbia University scientists found that in oldsters over 60, the strontium uptake appeared markedly higher than in their juniors aged 20 to 60, was concentrated in the vertebrae, the breastbone and the ribs.

* Greatest danger is from the strontium isotope with atomic weight 90, which has a long half-life, but the metal's other radioisotopes could also be harmful.

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