Japan confronts new concern in nuclear crisis: Food supply (LAT)

[jpak]

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-fg-japan-quake-main-20110320,0,5605102.story

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"This is the expected next development," said Dr. Glenn D. Braunstein, chairman of the department of medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, referring to the tainted foods. After the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986, he said, a major cause of the thyroid disease suffered by children came from consumption of contaminated food.

"There are two routes to radiation exposure: One is breathing it in, and the other is swallowing it through foodstuffs," he said. Other experts warned that contamination may also turn up in fish, a staple of the Japanese diet.

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Many Asian countries rely on Japan's food industry, especially for seafood. In Hong Kong, shoppers have reportedly been scrambling to buy Japanese infant formula and abalone, a delicacy, for fear that any new supplies would be contaminated.

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The amount of radiation found in the milk, if consumed for a year, is equivalent to levels found in one CT scan. The spinach contamination is equal to one-fifth the radioactivity in a CAT scan. And those levels could be harmful to children, said Braunstein of Cedars-Sinai.

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no more happy talk please