External versus internal exposure regarding food sampling
Please consider supplying Mortality/Morbidity numbers for the contamination found in the food samples tested. ie. expected cancer rates from consuming the foods tested based on ingestion of the amount of radioactive particle tested. The comparison to flying exposure is quaint but we don't plan on standing next to the contaminated milk but instead, will be feeding it to our babies.
As explained in our FAQ, we
As explained in our FAQ, we are not flippantly comparing ingested radiation to an airplane flight. We are not assuming that you will be standing next to a gallon of milk, but that you will be drinking it. Our comparison with EPA and FDA limits, in fact, assumes that you will be drinking it daily for an entire year.
Tim [BRAWM Team Member]
ingested vs flight
Thank you for your response.
Your site states: "The number in parentheses after the activity is the number of kilograms that one would need to consume to equal the radiation exposure of a single round trip flight from San Francisco to Washington D.C. (0.05 mSv)
The EPA’s MCL for iodine-131 is 3 picoCuries per liter. I am unable to compare mSv or millirems with picoCurries: reports that the units are not compatible. Not compatible results are also obtained with microsievets to picocurries.
Please elucidate uSv/uCi. The measurements (numerator and denominator) appear to be unrelated (not compatible) due to there being no conversion factor between the units themselves. Therefore they appear to be completly different items. Certainly this must be more than comparing apple to oranges with apples/oranges. How is such a fraction as apples/oranges or incompatible items such as uSv/uCi useful? What information are we glean from uSv/uCi? Please elucidate.
Dose Conversion Factor
Hi David,
You are absolutely right that Curies and Sieverts are incompatible units. The reason is that they do not measure the same thing. Curies are used to measure radioactivity ("how many nuclei are decaying per second?") and Sieverts are used to measure dose ("What are the health effects from absorbing the radiation?").
The connection between the two is basically that the more radioactivity one is exposed to, the larger the dose should be. This proportionality is expressed in the Dose Conversion Factor, explained on our Dose Conversion page. Determination of DCFs is done by health physicists, who study the health effects of radiation on people.
Mark [BRAWM Team Member]
continued
The site removed the link from 'WolframAlpha.com' that reports the incompatibility of mSv or mRem to pCi.