He: Cigarette? She: No, thanks, I already have cancer.Well, if you live in the fallout zone from a nuclear power plant, and an accident occurs, that little scene may be replayed thus:
Community Service Person: Here's your potassium iodide tablets from our emergency stockpile. You: No, thanks, I already have thyroid cancer.(note, this version of the joke reverses the point, since you're being offered something to PREVENT the cancer, rather than to CAUSE it. But it's still funny. A little. Well, about as funny as jokes about nuclear power plant accidents get, anyway.)
Seriously, though, have you checked whether you are near enough to a nuclear power plant to be affected by an inadvertant release of radioactive materials? And, if so, does your community stockpile potassium iodide? You, as a thyca-ster, don't need any. You can eat I-131 for lunch and I-126 for dessert (with a lemon drop for your salivary glands, of course :-). But you probably have a family whose needs are more normal. Make sure you have some potassium iodide (made with nutritious, stable I-127) on hand for them!
When I first became aware of this issue, I was quite frustrated trying to purchase some KI (that's the chemical abbreviation for potassium iodide). Apparently, although the stuff is dirt cheap, it was primarily sold in bulk for stockpiling by communities. (Not MY community, but that's a different story.) I found it impossible to get any via retail, even searching the internet extensively in the 1998 to early 1999 timeframe. Well, welcome to the year 2000 and Y2K/survivalist hysteria. There is now a meta-KI dealer, at http://www.ki4u.com/products.htm, with a variety of different forms and brands of KI. I can't recommend them, since I haven't used them. I even feel a bit redundant posting a link to them here, since they have done a terrific job of getting their site to be pulled up by all the search engines (it even popped up on me the other day when I did a search from Lycos on "potassium"! Very off-topic. The darn site clings like a burr.) But since I searched SO long for the dang stuff, I feel the need to pass on the info here. So here it is.
Also, I would take with a grain of NaCl (sodium chloride, another common and dirt-cheap salt, known commonly as "salt") the advice on their web site that you should stock 100 days' worth of KI for each person. Huh? Don't forget that the normal thyroid itself stockpiles iodine. Take the Anbex Iostat tablets for example - each tablet contains 130 milligrams (mg) KI, and there are 14 tablets in a pack. KI is 76% iodine, so that's about 99 mg of elemental iodine per tablet. The "Reference Daily Value" (formerly known as the U. S. Recommended Daily Allowance) for iodine is 150 micrograms (mcg) per day. There's 1,000 micrograms in a milligram, so you can see that one tablet provides 660 days' worth (66,000%) of the recommended daily allowance of iodine. The full course of 14 tablets, then, is about 9,000 day's worth of iodine, or TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of your recommended daily allowance. Your thyroid - I mean, the thyroid of someone who has a thyroid - sops this right up until it can't store any more. I don't claim to know much about the metabolism of iodine uptake in healthy thyroids, but it stands to reason that the protective effect of this dosage will last for a while. Besides, the 14-day regimens cost too much as it is!!
I actually purchased my KI from an outfit called Anbex (http://www.anbex.com/index.htm), but I can't really recommend them either. They lost my initial order, were not quick to respond to my inquiries, and when the product finally arrived it was not very well packaged. On the plus side, they never did charge my credit card ;-).
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Linda's Thyroid Cancer PageLast updated on October 5, 2000.
© 2000 linda_tam@alumni.hmc.edu