3 ms·

Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for e

by VLM 10y ago

Yes, plenty. The problem is radiation is incredibly wide ranging including wildly different materials and effects. Much like there isn't "the" treatment for electricity. You mean UV damage to the eyes from being exposed to arcs or thermal explosions or shock to heart or RF burns or ... and radiation is the same. Also some of the stuff he did was questionable purely chemically. So ... boring holes in lead, you're at least washing your hands before eating, right? Or the feeling I get from this guy, no. Or his refining process involving lithium metal, interesting but not advisable. I wonder what the guys "banana equivalent dose" was. He didn't get that much material, at least as reported by the press. A thousand times nothing is still nothing unless the true story is more interesting. From what I can find an unmolested smoke detector is about a tenth of a BED/yr so the mere presence of a thousand detectors in one room, if you sit in it for the entire year, is about the same as eating 100 bananas in that year, which I probably do! If you're sloppy and it stays outside your body its about the same. Unless you inhale it. He accumulated more "stuff" than the NRC feels safe to give out unlicensed, but the NRC is pretty pessimistic so he should have survived. And seemed to have done so, unsurprisingly.

maxerickson 10y ago
Yes, plenty. So what are they?
- VLM 10y ago
  To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers. In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage. This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it all off you first of all. Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of course. There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out 99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember. If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out. If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having them irradiate you from the inside for decades. If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was done along these lines at the end of WWII. Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside 100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery. If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    So I would draw a line between those. Most of them are treatments for exposure to radioactive materials and not for radiation damage (which I think was more the question being asked). The bone marrow transplant and supportive care are treating the damage.
    - codezero 10y ago
      I was definitely asking for any treatment, but I wasn't clear, so any information is of interest :)
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Dosimeters worn prior to an expected period of exposure, for diagnosis and triage. Drugs to reduce cellular and DNA damage from active radiation exposure. Drugs to prevent uptake of radioactive materials into the tissues of the body. Chelation therapy to remove potentially radioactive elements from the body. This prevents further, continuing damage from the same exposure. Drugs to stimulate the body's natural DNA repair functions. Transplant of undamaged (or less-damaged) hematopoietic stem cells or peripheral blood stem cells. More frequent screenings for cancers and other health maladies known to be associated with radiation exposure.
bonzini 10y ago
Americium is an alpha emitter (like plutonium, and with a shorter half life). Inhaling it is going to be much more dangerous than one or even many unmolested asking detectors.

by VLM 10y ago

maxerickson 10y ago

Yes, plenty. So what are they?

VLM 10y ago
To start there's triage. Go away and come back for cancer screening every five years. Stay here and we treat you. You're toast here's some painkillers. In between there's a wide mix of removing the cause and repairing the damage. This almost seems too obvious but there's obvious recent surface decontamination, wash it off. A test tube in the lab shattered, well get it all off you first of all. Only a step past that, if you chug heavy water you'll be encouraged to drink tap water to pee out the heavy water. Likewise if you ate something contaminated an hour or a day ago they'll give you stuff to make your digestive system explode out both ends. I donno if they'd feed you an expectorant for inhalation. There's no point if the exposure was months ago of course. There are peculiar specific treatments if you've been recently exposed to iodine isotopes from a bomb or very major plant accident they can flood your system with zero radioactivity clean iodine to convince your body to pee out 99% of your intake rather than adsorbing 100% of the bad stuff into your thyroid. Its like reducing your exposure by a factor of 100 just by popping some pills. There are other isotopes like that I can't remember. If you were doing radioactive labeling experiments obviously they'd flood your body with unlabeled clean stuff to make you pee the glowing stuff out. If its a bone-seeker there are mineral chleation treatments that are very hard on the skeleton but you'll pee out those isotopes which is better than having them irradiate you from the inside for decades. If you wipe out your bone marrow you're screwed unless you get a bone marrow transplant. In the short term they could pump units of blood into you. This works better if there's one victim per hospital than if there's an entire Japanese city and the hospital was vaporized, which is why not too much was done along these lines at the end of WWII. Similar to the above paragraph if you wipe out your digestive tract alongside 100K neighbors there's not much the hospitals can do, but if it was an unfortunate lab accident, you might be kept alive via IV until recovery. If its a surface burn I'm not sure what they'd do WRT preventative skin cancer, maybe skin graft it on general principles or wait and watch and see if a tumor forms. Obviously there's antibiotic treatment.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  So I would draw a line between those. Most of them are treatments for exposure to radioactive materials and not for radiation damage (which I think was more the question being asked). The bone marrow transplant and supportive care are treating the damage.
  - codezero 10y ago
    I was definitely asking for any treatment, but I wasn't clear, so any information is of interest :)
logfromblammo 10y ago
Dosimeters worn prior to an expected period of exposure, for diagnosis and triage. Drugs to reduce cellular and DNA damage from active radiation exposure. Drugs to prevent uptake of radioactive materials into the tissues of the body. Chelation therapy to remove potentially radioactive elements from the body. This prevents further, continuing damage from the same exposure. Drugs to stimulate the body's natural DNA repair functions. Transplant of undamaged (or less-damaged) hematopoietic stem cells or peripheral blood stem cells. More frequent screenings for cancers and other health maladies known to be associated with radiation exposure.

bonzini 10y ago

Americium is an alpha emitter (like plutonium, and with a shorter half life). Inhaling it is going to be much more dangerous than one or even many unmolested asking detectors.