Do RadX and RadAway from Fallout exist in real life? How do we medically prevent and treat radiation poisoning?
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Potassium iodide can be administered in some cases as a pill to protect against certain types of radiation exposure events.
There isn’t really much in the way of fixing radiation damage beyond regular old antibiotics and burn care stuff.
Fallout pills are kinda similar to iodine pills. If you get a lot of radiation but not really so much it burned you the next bad thing that happens is a bunch of radiation collects in your thyroid and makes that fail (or later gives you thyroid cancer). To prevent that “anti radiation” pills are generally just a bunch of iodine, so your thyroid will fill up with that instead. That is what you will see if you see a solider taking anti-radiation pills or hear about anti-radiation pills being shipped to civilians around chernobyl or something. They don’t really protect you from radiation in a general sense, but they do prevent a super common effect of sort of medium doses of radiation. More radiation and you get burned up and get burn treatment, less radiation and you get cancer 30 years later, medium amount and your thyroid fails but we do have protection pills for that one.
Nope, not really. Prevention is not exposing yourself to gamma radiation and wearing protective equipment and a respirator to avoid alpha and beta emitting dust getting inside your body through ingesting, breathing, etc. Tgere are some ways to help flush out some particles that got in – like taking a lot of iodine to prevent radioactive iodine from binding in the thyroid due to lack of space, but these are not universal.
Once you got acute radiation syndrome, the only treatment is trying to keep you alive long enough for your healthy cells to replicate and replace those that got fucked. In some cases, this involves organ or bone marrow transplants. If too many cells got damaged all over, then the patient basically just rots alive. Fun!
No. There’s no magical pill that can undo the damage of radiation exposure. The only thing you can do is prevent or minimize exposure in the first place. If you’ve been exposed to electromagnetic radiation like gamma rays or x-rays, that’s it, the damage is done. If you’ve been contaminated with radioactive particles, you can’t undo exposure you’ve already had, but you can prevent further exposure by decontaminating yourself.
If you’ve gotten radioactive particles inside your body, either through ingestion or inhalation, there’s very little you can do. I see some people here talking about iodine pills, but potassium iodide is of extremely limited use. All it does it protects your thyroid and ONLY your thyroid from iodine 131 and NO other radioisotope. It does not protect any other part of your body and it does not even protect your thyroid from any other type of radiation. You also have to start taking it before you are exposed, and you have to take it every day until you are no longer exposed. You can also use chelation therapy to remove certain radioisotopes inside your body, but again, that’s of limited utility because it only removes certain radioisotopes and it only stops future exposure, it can’t undo all the damage that those particles have already done inside your body.
As for treatment for radiation sickness, it’s just supportive. Blood transfusions, fluids, antibiotics, stem-cell transplants, and burn treatment if necessary, but there’s no way to undo the damage. If you got a mild dose, you can recover, but the higher the dose is, the more certain you are to die sooner from cancer or aplastic anemia, and at a certain point, with enough exposure, death is certain in a matter of days or weeks no matter how much medical treatment you get.
Not exactly, but there are something called chelation agents such as EDTA are used and are highly effective at removing metal ions from your body. Chelation means a chemical that binds to metal ions and makes them unavailable for other molecules to react with. This doesn’t actually treat the tissue damage caused by the radiation, but only removes those metals. Uranium & plutonium, and their decay products, are all metals. So removing these molecules from your body stops you from receiving any more radiation. Again, this doesn’t actually treat any tissue damage but prevents the damage from getting worse.
No, but the Hamzat Suit at least is real and helps protecting from radioactive materials. Once you have been poisoned there is nothing you can do. You become a ghoul, from the inside.
In case of a reactor accident, radioactive Iodide is often one of the issues. As your body stores iodide naturally this is a problem. Pills full of non radioactive iodide exist to block your body from absorbing the radioactive stuff, it needs to be taken before exposure though to fill all the iodide storage as clearing it out and replacing it is not possible. This is the closest you can get to a pill against radiation. Radioactive Iodide is not the only problem though, even with a reactor accident so it is not a cure all by far.
RadX kind of exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amifostine
How this works: Radiation harms you by splitting the water molecules in your cells. The split parts (like OH-) can then oxidize and damage your DNA. Radioprotective molecules like the one I linked remove these oxidative parts before they can do damage.
This is used in radiation therapy to protect healthy cells when irradiating a tumor. I don’t know if it can be/is used in other contexts. (Also, this only really works against gamma radiation, alpha and beta (I think) can damage DNA directly)
I always think of it as a rapid chelation agent that rapidly purges the blood of the radiation.
We have a host of chemicals we can does people with right after radiation exposure to help them, but a large number are kinda toxic. One of the less toxic ones, and one of the most commonly used is [Potassium Iodide](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_iodide#:~:text=Potassium%20iodide%20is%20a%20chemical,types%20of%20radiopharmaceuticals%20are%20used.) Which stops the uptake of highly toxic radioactive iodine isotopes in the thyroid, a major cause of death in many radiological accidents. Won’t help much against a bomb or fallout, admittedly.
Edit I should also be clear that these chemicals take you from guaranteed dead to hanging onto deaths door, radiation is immensely hard to treat just because of what it is
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