Nine U.S. states with nuclear reactors inside their borders have no plan in place, in the event of an accident, to provide potassium iodide pills to their residents to combat some of the ill effects of radiation, the Center for Public Integrity reports.
According to the investigative news organization, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Texas and Washington all have opted out of a federal program to provide the medication and have no comparable plan of their own.
Illinois also opted out of the federal program, though state health officials say that they have their own contingency plan in case of a nuclear catastrophe. Wisconsin allowed individual counties to decide whether to participate in the federal effort, and only one chose to be included.
In all, only 22 of the 33 states with nuclear plants have accepted the pills from the federal government for all of their potentially affected communities.
Potassium iodide pills, also known as KI pills, help prevent radiation from being absorbed into the thyroid, one of the first parts of the body where radioactive material would be likely to build up and which is particularly vulnerable to radiation-caused cancer. Although the pills have risks and do not protect the entire body against prolonged exposure to radiation, they are considered an important countermeasure in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear disaster.
Based on the pills’ benefits, U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., this week renewed his call for the federal government to adopt a contingency plan to distribute the medication to everyone living within 20 miles of a nuclear plant. The current federal directive applies to people living within a 10-mile radius of a nuclear plant.
While Markey argues that authorities can’t move quickly enough to evacuate people in a major emergency, many of the states that have no potassium iodide plan maintain that they can.
“For the general public, the iodine is only one of the radioactive chemicals that would be released” and “that one little pill is not going to protect you” from the others, Peter Ricca, an emergency response manager in Louisiana, told the Center for Public Integrity. “Having people evacuate is the most effective and best way.”
In the meantime, as The New York Times reports, the demand for KI pills in the U.S. has jumped due to the crisis in Japan, where the damage to a nuclear plant caused by last weekend’s earthquake and subsequent tsunami has led to evacuations and rising fears of radiation exposure.
“We’ve sold more in the past three days than we have in the past three years,” said Jim Small, president of the American wing of Recipharm, a Swedish company that manufactures potassium iodide.
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