How Iodine Pills Can—and Can’t—Help Against Radiation

As unease about Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling grows, together with issues concerning the security of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy plant, officers in Kyiv are distributing iodine tablets to assist shield residents towards potential radiation publicity. In neighboring Poland, the federal government can also be making free iodine tablets out there. Likewise, in Finland, pharmacies are operating out of the tablets after the nation’s well being ministry suggested households to purchase them in case of an emergency.

Such measures are precautionary, however they will additionally put individuals on edge. Google searches for “potassium iodide”—a naturally occurring kind of iodine that may counteract some results of radiation—spiked on the finish of February shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and are trending upward once more. The battle has additionally sparked panic shopping for of the tablets in a number of European international locations, together with Belgium, France, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, though intelligence consultants have been at pains to level out—regardless of US president Joe Biden’s alarmist remarks—that there aren’t any indicators that Russia is planning to make use of nuclear weapons. Likewise, although the scenario at Zaporizhzhia is precarious following two latest energy outages, as of October 14, backup energy had been restored.

Simply because you may go surfing and refill on iodine tablets, doesn’t imply you must. And in international locations the place they’re being distributed as a precaution, it’s additionally essential to grasp what the tablets can and can’t do. First, the tablets, which comprise potassium iodide, aren’t an antidote for all types of radiation publicity. Additionally, they’re solely capable of shield the thyroid—the small, butterfly-shaped gland that sits on the base of the neck.

Nuclear weapons and energy vegetation depend on a course of referred to as fission, or the splitting of atoms into fragments, to generate a considerable amount of vitality. Throughout a nuclear strike or plant meltdown, one of many radioactive substances that’s launched is iodine-131, a darkish purple fuel that may be absorbed by the pores and skin or inhaled. As soon as it enters the physique, it’s absorbed by the thyroid. This gland is nice at absorbing iodine, as a result of pure iodine is required to supply important hormones. However publicity to the radioactive model damages the fragile organ and raises the danger of thyroid most cancers.

Youngsters are probably the most in danger. Following the nuclear accident on the Chernobyl energy plant in 1986, there was a marked improve in thyroid most cancers circumstances in kids and adolescents within the years following the catastrophe. (A research 35 years later discovered that radiation-related gene mutations didn’t, nevertheless, get handed to the longer term kids of those that had been uncovered.) The danger is far decrease in individuals 40 and older, and the World Well being Group and US Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention typically don’t suggest potassium iodide for that age group except the projected radiation dose could be very excessive.

Iodine tablets block the thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine by filling it with the common form—the gland can solely take in a lot directly, and it could actually’t inform the distinction between the 2 sorts. “The human thyroid has a finite capability for iodine. In case you overload it with iodine from different sources, it’s going to mainly be full,” says Edward Geist, a coverage researcher on nuclear vitality and warfare on the RAND Company, a Washington, DC-based assume tank. “Which means while you encounter this radioactive iodine, you are a lot much less prone to take in it in your thyroid and also you get a a lot decrease dose from having this iodine in you.”