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From: brucec@orca.UUCP (Bruce Cohen)
Newsgroups: net.cooks,net.veg,net.med
Subject: Re: irradiated food
Message-ID: <624@orca.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Feb-84 12:25:09 EST
Article-I.D.: orca.624
Posted: Fri Feb 24 12:25:09 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Feb-84 14:43:37 EST
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Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
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I thought I'd help inject some facts into this discussion.  First, irradiated
foods have been around since the early '50s at least.  I tasted an irradiated
pork chop in, I think, 1957, and was told that it had been on the shelf for
several years at that point.  That pork chop was part of an Army study to
determine the long-term economy and safety of irradiating foods for years of
storage.  Given the many years of study (not just by the Army, or just in
this country) since then, I think that time has already told.

Second, the FDA decision to allow the sale of irradiated food comes after a
UNESCO decision that irradiated foods are safe for human consumption.  The
maximum radiation dose acceptable to UNESCO is 10 (that's ten) times the dose
acceptable by the FDA.  All the studies so far show that there is negligible
danger of chemical or genetic modification of food at the doses accepted by
UNESCO (100,000 rads, if you are interested).

Third, it is not true that the irradiation of food will be the first mass use
of isotopes outside the weapon and power industries.  Medical isotopes
involve tons of waste per year, much of it containers and wrappers which are
easy to mistake as safe.  Incidently, the irradiaters in use for food are
also used to sterilize disposable medical supplies.  Also, the construction
industry uses a lot of cobalt-60 in weld analyzers, and other types of
non-destructive test equipment.  It was just such a cobalt source which was
illegally dumped in a scrap heap in Mexico recently, and used to make
radioactive tables.  I would expect that, since food irradiation benefits
nicely from economy of scale, that the sources used would be few and large,
and that transportation of them would not be common.

There is quite a bit more information on the operation and safety of food
irradiation in the latest issue of High Technology.

				Bruce Cohen
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