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
Radioactive iodine-131 is one of the products of nuclear fission. The human body can’t tell the difference between radioactive iodine-131 and stable iodine-127. So the body will absorb and hold onto iodine-131. Like a trojan horse, now the individual will have radioactive elements within them irradiating their thyroid and bloodstream. Additionally iodine is absorbed and used slowly so it would hang around for a while before it could be replaced with the non radioactive iodine-127
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