Watching Chernobyl miniseries and a nuclear physicist gave a girl “stable iodine” saying it would prevent her thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine, any attempt to Google this question got me results on radiation therapy.
Edit: I’m not asking about radiation treatment or iodine pills, I want to know why iodine specifically is so dangerous to our bodies when irradiated as opposed to other elements/molecules our bodies regularly use.
In: Biology
The largest concentrations of iodine in the body are found in the thyroid. Your thyroid makes use of iodine in order to produce some of the hormones it makes. The main reason radioactive is iodine is such a major risk is because its one of the few byproducts of nuclear fission whose stable, less dangerous isotopes play an important biological role and is thus absorbed by the body.
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