On December 6th the US Department of Health and Human Services put a solicitation notice on the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website for 14 million 65 mg doses of Potassium Iodide, the standard treatment protocol for someone exposed to high levels of radiation. As a stipulation of this solicitation, which gets bid on by registered contractors, the HHS requires the 14 million doses to be delivered by the end of January. In other words, the HHS needs enough doses of Potassium Iodide to treat 14 million Americans by the end of January!
The Devil is in the details
The primary use for Potassium Iodide is used for treating, as well as minimizing damaging effects from, radiation poisoning. The area of the human body that are most-sensitive to radiation exposure are the thyroid gland. It absorbs the radiation like a wet sponge.
Potassium Iodide is a salt-stable form of Iodine that isn’t radioactive, but will still be absorbed by the thyroid gland the same way that radioactive Iodine would be. Immediately after exposure, if given larger doses of Potassium Iodide, one can fill the thyroid gland up to the point that it is unable to absorb an damaging doses of radiation, or greatly reduced amounts anyway. While this offers some comfort, it still cannot prevent initial damage, or help in reducing damage to other areas of the body. So really, when one thinks of Potassium Iodide as being a “shield” against radiation poisoning, it’s really only a shield like one would imagine a dinner plate would be a shield against a shot-gun blast. Yeah, if you hold it over the important stuff, you might end up better than you would have without it but your still going to get rocked.
If bad metaphors haven’t helped you imagine all that Potassium Iodide can do for you, check out the official CDC website. Since Potassium Iodide is the official course of treatment for populations in danger zones of radiation the CDC has all sorts of information regarding it’s uses and the reasoning behind it. I think it’s right next to their zombie-preparedness page. So, if the government were, for whatever reason, expecting to treat a large number of people for radiation poisoning, they would be planning on doing it with Potassium Iodide.
Fukushima concerns “poison” the mainstream
For those of us that keep up with current events, when we hear radiation poisoning, many of our minds wander to recall what we’ve been hearing regarding the situation at Fukushima’s Daiichi reactor III. With recent reports of the crew aboard the USS Ronald Reagan suffering from horrible radiation poisoning symptoms, it seems reasonable to assume all is not as well as the Japanese Government would have the international community believe. The sailors are suffering from much more than “mild” poisoning; one woman describing her symptoms as a 6 month long menstrual-cycle accompanied by 60 pound weight swings on a monthly basis.
Reports of the situation at Daiichi 3 being much more grave, than publicly acknowledged by the Japanese Gov’t and TEPCO, have been rushing into the alternative news community since the reactor began to destabilize. As a whole however, few of the mainstream reports have straye away from the official narrative put out by the Japanese; Fukushima is under control.
However mainstream interests may have finally been piqued amidst recent reports of dead marine life covering 98% of the seafloor in some areas, elevated radiation levels on the US west coast, and China’s refusal to buy shellfish from US west coast bays suddenly. One might wonder why it took these reporters to require reports of US naval officers experiencing uterine bleeding before the official narrative given by the Japanese government was questioned. Former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur, now contributer to The Young Turks, describes the resistance one meets within the press community when expressing opinions that run counter to the narrative:
“I was on MSNBC at the time when this happened, I said, “Don’t trust what the Japanese government is saying, they’ll say trust what the electric power company is saying. Go, go, go, get outta there. Get as far away from that plant as you can. It’s literally a core meltdown.” And they always don’t want people to panic, so they were always like, “Oh it’s going to be okay.” [...] I’m like, “You’re crazy man, don’t be anywhere near that reactor.” And I remember at the time, of course not at The Young Turks, but on cable news, people were like, “Hey Cenk, you know, I don’t know that you want to say that, because the official government position is that it’s safe.” Oh, is that the official government position? Now go explain that to the people who served on the USS Ronald Reagan.”
Never trust the government
Reports of deadly radiation are running rampant through the alternative community, and have even begin to show their face within the mainstream. Soon, you might even catch your elderly neighbors talking about picking up some Potassium Iodide after watching a report on Fox News. Regardless, it seems that a horrible situation has been allowed to become even worse through the reluctance, and most likely down-right refusal, of TEPCO and the Japanese government to allow the full scope of the deadly truth to get into view of the international community.
Governments usually respond to disasters very similarly; first move is to avoid panic. The Japanese didn’t want to panic the world, or tarnish their honor and now, as a consequence of their reluctance, Japanese citizens and international aid personal find themselves in a horrible state of being. Panic is usually avoided by keeping their citizens as blind to the truth as possible, until confrontation with the truth becomes inevitable.
The crucial question at this juncture; “would our government be reluctant about warning us of potential disaster, in an attempt to avoid panic?”
14 Million doses of Potassium Iodide say that might just be the case.
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