This from Wiki:
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Due to its mode of beta decay, iodine-131 is notable for causing mutation and death in cells which it penetrates, and other cells up to several millimeters away. For this reason, high doses of the isotope are sometimes paradoxically less dangerous than low doses, since they tend to kill thyroid tissues which would otherwise become cancerous as a result of the radiation. For example, children treated with moderate dose of I-131 for thyroid adenomas had a detectable increase in thyroid cancer, but children treated with a much higher dose did not. Similarly most studies of very high dose I-131 for treatment of Graves disease have failed to find any increase in thyroid cancer, even though there is linear increase in thyroid cancer risk with I-131 absorption at moderate doses.[1] Thus, iodine-131 is increasingly less employed in small doses in medical use (especially in children), but increasingly is used only in large and maximal treatment doses, as a way of killing targeted tissues. This is known as "therapeutic use."
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So it sounds like if you have to have I-131, then make sure you get LOTS of it. Weird. Also, with the short half life, eating aged beef and cheese should be better. Aged apples and veggies don't work out so well. I guess you could by frozen veggies and not eat them for a while. Every 8 days, the amount of radiation is cut in half, so after a couple of months, the radiation level would be down to about 1% of where it started. This, of course, only applies to I-131. Radioactive isotopes of other fission by-products could hang around a lot longer.
AI
