Tokyo Says Infants Face Health Risk From Radiation in Tap Water
March 23, 2011, 6:56 AM EDTBy Naoko Fujimura, Kathleen Chu and Frederik Balfour
March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Tokyo residents should avoid giving tap water to infants after radioactive iodine was found in the city’s supply at levels twice the limit for infants, the metropolitan government said.
Iodine-131 was detected at 210 becquerel per kilogram at the Kanamachi purification plant in Tokyo’s Katsushika district, compared with a limit of 100 becquerel per kilogram for infants, the water department said in a statement today. The recommended limit for adults is 300.
Children are susceptible to radiation poisoning from iodine, which can accumulate in the thyroid and cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. The announcement sent beverage-maker stocks surging in Tokyo trading and caused panic-buying of bottled water in supermarkets.
“To implement full-scale preparations, please don’t use tap water when you make powder milk,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference in Tokyo. “We will consider measures with Tokyo’s water bureau so that families with infants won’t have problems. It’s OK to use water for daily life.”
Shoppers in the basement of the Marunouchi Building next to Tokyo Station crowded around televisions to listen to news on the water advisory. One woman in the Meidi-ya supermarket filled a basket with bottled water.
Panic Buying
In the city’s Ogikubo area, Yoji Okada carried 24 bottles of water, the maximum he could carry, from a 100-yen store.
“Everyone is panic-buying right now,” Okada, 38, said. “The bigger bottles of water are nowhere to be seen.”
Kirin Holdings Co., Japan’s biggest beverage maker, climbed 1.9 percent to 1,103 yen. Coca-Cola West Co. jumped 5.6 percent to 1,454 yen.
Asahi Breweries Ltd., Japan’s biggest beermaker by volume and also a producer of soft drinks and water, increased 2.6 percent to 1,476 yen. Kurita Water Industries Ltd., a maker of water-treatment equipment, rose 2.8 percent to 2,367 yen.
“There’s no water,” said Tokyo resident Chiho Hasunuma, 26, the mother of a 5-month-old girl. “My mother ran to supermarkets and convenience stores to find mineral water as we didn’t have any stock at home, but she came back empty- handed.”
Seafood Monitoring
Water filters made by Panasonic Corp. and Toray Industries Inc. aren’t designed to eliminate iodine, spokesmen for both companies said in telephone interviews today. Potassium iodide pills can prevent the uptake of iodine and lower the risk of cancer, according to the Geneva-based WHO.
In Tokyo’s Marunouchi district, Yuichiro Kato, who has a one-and-a-half year old baby, said he was able to buy eight bottles of water from two stores. One of them restricted buyers to five half-liter bottles each, said Kato, who works at a brokerage.
Radiation being released by the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant, which was crippled March 11 by a magnitude-9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, is showing up in the ocean and the nation’s food supply. The radioactive materials released by damaged fuel rods include iodine-131, cesium-134 and cobalt, according to plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co.
The Japanese government said today for the first time that eating food produced near the nuclear plant may carry long-term risks because of increasing levels of radiation in vegetables.
Milk, Vegetables
“We are seeing these figures going up so we are looking at the possibility of levels reaching levels that may harm human health,” Edano said.
The government instructed regulators to implement maximum monitoring of domestic seafood, Edano said. The nation consumes about 9 million metric tons of seafood a year, second behind China, according to the website of the Sea Around Us Project, a collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the Pew Environment Group.
The levels of radiation found in milk and vegetables so far could cause a slight increase in the number of cancer cases, said Shih-Yew Chen, a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The prescribed safe limit for iodine-131 in vegetables is set at 2,000 becquerels per kilogram and 500 per kilogram for radioactive cesium.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan ordered a halt to shipments of leafy vegetables from Fukushima prefecture and shipments of milk and parsley from neighboring Ibaraki prefecture, his office said today. People eating vegetables from Fukushima for the past 10 days will have ingested half the natural level of a year’s worth of radiation, the nation’s health ministry said in a statement.
Fears of Radiation
The government also is investigating whether food contaminated with radiation is already on the market, Edano said.
Milk and fresh produce from Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma prefectures -- the four closest to the damaged nuclear plant -- will be barred from the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
“With radiation, you can’t see it, you can’t smell it and it’s known to cause cancer,” Slim Dinsdale, a food safety consultant based in Norwich, England, said in a telephone interview today. “And cancer is still brings fear into people’s hearts, particularly in Japan with the aftermath of the atomic bombs.”
--With assistance from Yasumasa Song, Anna Mukai and Takako Iwatani in Tokyo; Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett in Singapore; and Monami Yui in Hong Kong. Editors: Michael Tighe, Frank Longid
To contact the reporters on this story: Naoko Fujimura in Tokyo at nfujimura@bloomberg.net; Frederik Balfour in Hong Kong at fbalfour@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Teo Chian Wei at cwteo@bloomberg.net; Frank Longid at flongid@bloomberg.net
