Irish people are more vulnerable to suffering ill-effects from a nuclear accident than other nationalities due to the low iodine content in the native diet, an expert in thyroid disease research has warned.
Dr Peter Smyth, director of the UCD endocrine laboratory, said Ireland was "a country of borderline dietary iodine intake". This meant the population would be more susceptible to absorbing radioactive iodine which might be released in the case of a nuclear accident at Sellafield, he said.
Dr Smyth, who is a member of the Government's consultative committee on nuclear emergency planning, said yesterday he had recommended for years that iodine tablets be distributed to homes as a precautionary measure.
His advice was not heeded, however, and it was only last week - when it was discovered that health boards had insufficient stocks of tablets - that the Department of Health decided it would distribute ahead of a possible accident.
Dr Smyth said "the idea of hundreds of people queuing for tablets after an accident was really nonsense. For one thing you're going to be out in the open air when you should be sheltering".
The tablets serve to saturate the thyroid gland with stable iodine, thus minimising the risk of absorbing radioactive iodine which is carried in plumes.
Dr Smyth said that for the tablets to be effective one had to take them at least six hours before the plume arrived. A single 65 milligram tablet would give adequate protection to a child for 24 hours, he said. However, if the winds changed, and a plume returned, as what happened in Belarus after the Chernobyl disaster, further doses might be necessary, he said.
