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In Defense of Iodine Snatchers

Posted by Charlie Foster on April 1, 2011

In hindsight, and with mounting evidence that wind-blown radioactive dust poses no public health risk on this side of the Pacific, it’s easy to mock the paranoia of those fellow Americans who immediately after hearing about Japan’s nuclear crisis ran to their nearest pharmacies and snatched up entire supplies of potassium iodide. Um, overacting much? And did you hear the one about the Great Chinese Salt Panic? Thousands of people throughout that country stocked up on iodized salt, even though you’d have to consume several pounds of it in one sitting for it to have the effect of blocking radioiodine from your thyroid. Simmah down now, people! And what about those silly Russians who made a run on local kelp supplies? Morons.

Or maybe not. We science journalists have a tendency to take the perspective of the experts we interview – those nuclear engineers, epidemiologists and health physicists whose close relationships with numbers and units of measurement allows them to say with confidence that 0.03 becquerels of radiation in a liter of milk is really nothing to worry about. But my thinking shifted a bit last week after talking to risk communication expert Peter Sandman for a post about the Japanese government’s bungled PR efforts. He made me think that perhaps self-preservation isn’t all that moronic.

“People want to do something so they feel more efficacious, so they feel more in control,” said Sandman when I asked him about hoarding iodine. “It sounds like it’s probably not necessary, and it’s certainly disobedient since the government is saying don’t do it. But it’s not harmful, it’s not distorting their lives and it’s giving them some sense that if the government is wrong and the experts are wrong and it turns out worse then they say it’s going to turn out, I’ll have an ace in the hole. I don’t think that’s stupid.”

Sandman also had an important note on semantics. In the news, you’ll often see the run on potassium iodide described as a panic.

“That’s not real panic,” Sandman told me. In the field of risk communication, he said, the word panic is reserved for harmful behavior that happens when people are too upset to think straight. They are so caught up with sudden, uncontrollable fear, they do things they would never do if they had their wits about them. Said Sandman: “It’s not panic to go to the store and buy some iodine. It’s panic if you’re in such a hurry to get to the store that you run over your grandmother.”

Which is good to know as I read that radioactive iodine has now been detected here in New York. I know I’m not at risk. But I also know I’m not panicking or being stupid when I reach for the bag of kelp chips.

Related posts:

  1. In Japan, a New Legacy of Mistrust
  2. Wake Up Call For Young Japanese: The New Meaning Of Nuclear
  3. News Making You Paranoid? You’re Not Alone
  4. USGS Experts Talk Foreshocks and Aftershocks Of Japan 8.9
  5. the wraparound: The New Meaning of Nuclear
  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SSRRJOEOEUC2B772D45OBLNDHU Elenor

    Many people, most especially the “experts,” pooh-pooh people making preparations for various sorts of “disasters” — right up until it’s too late, and then they finally start telling folks to get ready! Anyone who has lived through a hurricane knows it is absolutely NOT panic to make a run to the store for plywood, water, and canned foods. (Candles and dry ice don’t go amiss, either!) Anyone living in a floodplain knows that having sandbags and drinking water at the ready is not panic. Anyone living in N’Orleans SHOULD have known having food stores, lots of potable water, and a gun or two (or, preferably, a planned escape route with transportation arranged and used) was not panic! I recommend highly Sandman’s article on “panic panic” (“Fear of Fear: The Role of Fear in Preparedness … and Why It Terrifies Officials”) — and how it is the “experts” pushing the concept of panic on people who are taking reasonable precautions for a possible — or likely — disaster!

    Last week, I was dismayed and not a little horrified to visit my Los Angles-living sister (with a brain-injured husband, a Type 1 diabetic 15-yr-old, and my 87-yr-old mother) and when I asked her — in light of the Japan disaster — where THEIR ‘meet-up place was, for when THEIR astonishingly huge earthquake happens: and she said blithely, “A what? We don’t have one.” (I suggested her son’s school — as most parents head for their kid(s), and she said, “okay, that was theirs.”) At least my mother called the gas co. in to put in an automatic shut-off — as her house did not have one and she had no idea how to shut the gas off.

    Those of us who prepare — to whatever extent — for likely disasters keep trying to point out that if Japan — the MOST prepared for earthquake and tsunami country on the globe could suffer such a horrendous disaster, what will happen here in the States?!

    And yes, I brought my potassium iodide pills with me to LA, intending to offer them for my nephew if there was need. (Apparently, those of us over 40 are not likely — or not AS likely — to need KI for such a small radiation dosing as was predicted.) Of course I have them, along with Tamiflu for the eventual bird flu pandemic, and stores of water. (Light on the food stores, still, but I’m only partly a survivalist…)

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