woah holy shit a bio?

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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Ok no more edits, just replies. The above used human values, and human doses. Cats likely have a different rate of everything, but the iodine rate of decay doesn’t change.

    I mean I get the point the guy is showing, but it’s a very low dose dosimeter.

    Radiation can be scary because it’s hard to understand, but it doesn’t have to be so scary every time you hear something click that fast.


  • peopleproblems@lemmy.worldtocats@lemmy.worldRadioactive Cat
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    2 months ago

    For anyone curious - yes radiation therapy does this to humans too.

    If you have like a blood draw while you’re radioactive they usually have to stick in in a lead box until it decays enough to not affect other samples or lab devices.

    However, at 2000 cpm, you won’t be getting radiation sickness from your cat. You may get a small increase in cancer risk if you’re cuddling with it 24/he a day for a few days, but that doesn’t account for the sources Half-Life either

    Edit:

    I watched the video again, because I didn’t catch if the card had an equivalent dose for the counts. It does, in uSv/h. Since it’s 2300 cpm, it says >13 uSv / hr. We can probably use that lower value, but for shits and giggles we’ll say it’s 15. If the Cesium iodine in the cat didn’t have a half life, in about 8 days 8 hours of cuddling with the cat he’d have been exposed to the same amount of radiation as a single mammogram.

    Edit 2: I mistakenly said cesium, but it’s iodine they used - probably Iodine 125 with a half life of 60 days. The biological half life of iodine depends on where it ends up - 100 days for thyroid to 14 days in kidneys. I don’t know the half life of it’s decay products but they are stable. What’s cool about knowing this is we can calculate how long the cat will be radioactive. On the upper end, where the thyroid unrealistically holds 100% of the iodine, we can use the two half life values to figure out how radioactive he really was in 8 days with decay. Unless I did it way wrong, he’d have fallen below 2000 cpm in 8.3 days. In 60 days using that same estimate, it should have fallen to < 800cpm. Likely lower. All in all, no it’s safe to cuddle with your radioactive cat.

    Edit 3: the lowest clearly linked dose to increased risk of cancer is 100mSv. Or ~278 days at the initial rate of constant cuddling.