Stuff You Should Know - How Radiation Sickness Works

Episode Date: July 12, 2016

Fortunately, science has very few instances where humans have been exposed to acute radiation poisoning to study for clues to treating radiation sickness. They have found, though, that those few instances have been grave. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

So this is, as they say, Stuff You Should Know. Who's that? Me? Okay, just me. Gotcha, no one else calls it this. Everybody calls it that, what do you call that? That's what they call it. Right. You know the one with the dudes? Right, they just ramble on.

All right, go on tangents. Oh, Stuff You Should Know. I have a family member that even, you know, not blood relative, I'll just say that, who a couple of years ago were like, you know, you guys, you need to get to the point. You can't even, sometimes there's like, six to 10 minutes of stuff

where you can start talking about the thing. Yeah. It's like, I know, sir. Glad you enjoy it. Yeah. This is not someone I see a lot. Just trying to be vague. Would he know who he was?

He probably didn't even remember saying this. Oh, it was at a party or something? No. I'm just, I'm banking on that. Okay. Maybe if I see him again, he'll say. I know what you were saying. I heard your message.

I know you were talking about me. Your thinly veiled message. Right. It came on the heels of the neighbor's dog telling me to do stuff I didn't want to do. Oh, right. He hears messages everywhere. That's what I'm trying to say.

He's not the son of Sam. No. No. David Berkowitz, right? Yeah. We should do a show on him. We really should. Well, you know what?

We should do a show where we talk about all the ones that we said we would do a show on and just forgot. Just a list. Yeah. 30 minutes. Just read the words out. That'd be neat. David Berkowitz, number 28.

Just start some Andy Kaufman-esque thing to see how much will people take before they hate us. I wrote a really cool Rolling Stone profile of him from like 1981, maybe something like that. Oh, really? Really good. Nice. On Andy Kaufman?

Yeah. He's a really interesting cat. I know. He was basically just doing it all for himself. Yeah. That's why he was into comedy, just to amuse himself, nobody else. Yeah.

So it takes a lot of colonists. And I think he inspired a lot of people who ended up bastardizing what he did to I think a lot of people that thought they followed in his footsteps, brought a mean spirit. Yeah, like Bob Newhart. To things, to their work. Like Gilbert Godfrey?

No, like Borat and stuff like that, where you're masquerading as someone to get a rise out of somebody. But the joke's really on that person. Yeah, I got you. I mean, I like Borat too, but I don't think Andy Kaufman, I think he always had a sweetness about him. I see what you mean.

I don't think he was ever mean-spirited and tried to make other people look dumb. Yeah. Yeah, that's my dumb opinion. I think the joke wasn't between him and the audience on another person. The joke was on the audience. And the joke was to himself, is between him and himself.

Whereas with Sacha Baron Cohen, everybody's laughing at Ron Paul. Right. Well, you saw, did you see Man on the Moon? I haven't seen it in a long time. It was good. When he first did the wrestling thing with his future wife and afterwards she was so mad, he was like, wasn't that great?

Like you were so terrific, you were wonderful. And she was like, what? What's going on? He's like, that was such a great performance. And she was like, oh, I thought you were some jerk. Was that Courtney Love? Yeah. Yeah.

What a bizarre casting. I know. So that's a radiation sickness's intro. Man. Well, we had to mention something light, because this isn't. No. This is rough stuff. Yeah.

Pretty heavy. The one good thing about radiation, this is a Grabster article, by the way. Yeah. Is that the one good thing about it? Yeah. The one good thing about radiation sickness is it's surprisingly tough to get. Yes. Most people who just go about their average day exposed to sunlight or, you know, even

Microwave in their coffee. Yes. Yes. Or, you know, tuning in their favorite radio program. Sure. While it's around still. Yeah. Or talking on their cell phone, that's another controversial one.

Sure. You're not going to get radiation sickness. And the reason why you may get cancer from these things, who knows? But you're not going to get radiation sickness, because the energy, the radiation coming from these things, like your cell phone from the sun from the microwave, are of a low enough frequency and a low enough energy that they don't have the potential to ionize, create ionizing radiation. Which is?

Oh, well, that's where radiation knocks an electron off of an atom. That's right. Creating an ion. And ions can wreak serious havoc in a human body in particular. Yeah. So you're not going to, in fact, even the cancer that you might get one day due to long term exposure to your cell phone, if that's even a thing. That's not called radiation sickness.

If you worked at a power plant that leaked and ended up getting cancer, that's not even considered radiation sickness. Or if you're an x-ray technician and you get radiation poisoning or cancer years later. Yeah. Still not radiation sickness. Radiation sickness is where you are hit with such a huge, immediate dose of ionizing radiation that you die pretty quickly from it and you're going to also experience immediate symptoms.

Yeah. Or you become the Incredible Hulk. Right. In the case of gamma rays. It was gamma, wasn't it? I think so, right? Yeah. He wouldn't have turned into a monster.

That's fictitious. He instead would have possibly lost consciousness, maybe had diarrhea, vomited. He probably would have had blistered skin that would have never fully healed and would have formed scars under the skin called cheloids. Scars that eventually are outside of the skin. Yeah. And then it would have just gotten even worse. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?

Well, people should know what they're getting into. So radiation sickness is an acute situation and it's a cumulative effect after you get that acute dose of radiation poisoning, is another way to call it. And there are three kinds of ionizing radiation, or is this article that the Grabster, he had a couple of nice little quips in here. Did you notice the Neil Young? No. I never would.

I would have to say Dash Neil Young after it for me to get it. And you still wouldn't get it? No. Well, one of his paragraphs is entitled, Ionizing Radiation and the Damage Done. I think he was playing on the needle and the damage done, maybe? Probably. Neil Young's song. He's a cool cat, Grabster.

Probably so. So like he says, it comes in three flavors, alpha particles, beta particles, and the gamma rays, the aforementioned gamma rays. Alpha particles, the good news is they're the least dangerous for external exposure. And the other good news is your t-shirt, well, you're not wearing a t-shirt. I'm wearing one underneath my outer shirt. Well, then you're doubly protected, friend, because your clothing is even strong enough to stop an external alpha particle.

Right. They just bounce harmlessly off of your clothing. That's right. And go wah, wah. Right. So you would think that they're not dangerous at all, not true, because you can still inhale this stuff. Yeah.

And ingest it in the form of radon gas, and that's where things can get bad. Yeah, when you ingest a radioactive particle, an ionizing particle, it gets into your body. It gets transported around. And as it does, it goes through and is like, hey, Adam, good to meet you. I'm going to knock this electron off, and now you're a free radical if you're a water molecule. And if you're going to, that's the way we say molecule from now on, by the way. And you're going to go off and wreak havoc on other stuff, right?

Because when the radioactive particle interacts with an atom and knocks the electron off, that's not the only damage done. When that electron is released or knocked off, energy in the form of what, 33 electron volts? 33 EVs. Are released. And that weakens the chemical bonds holding the atom together. So it just totally alters the structure of the atom, right?

Well, when you're altering the structure of an atom, atoms make up molecules. So you alter the structure of the molecule. When you're talking about molecules, these things make up the basis of everything from the proteins that are expressed in your body that carry out functions to the cells that house these functions, their act as factories. And all of a sudden, you have all these weird alterations in like flawed and damaged processes in your body, and it leads to systemic malfunction, which leads to your at least severe illness, if not death.

And all of this has to do with these little particles going through your body and bombarding and knocking electrons off of their atoms. Yeah. And we'll get into the specifics of how much is too much in a bit. But to continue, the beta particles are next up. They move very fastly with a lot of energy and can travel a few feet when they're emitted from its source. The good news here is, is that they can be blocked out by solid objects, not your clothing.

It's not solid enough. No, but like concrete. Or for mica, if you were hiding under your kitchen counter, probably would block a beta. 1957, right? I like for mica still. It still has its purpose. Oh, you have, what do you have like marble or quartz or something? No.

My dining room table is wood. No, no, no. Your kitchen counter. Oh. Like if you got into a cabinet. Yeah. You know, I don't know what my countertop is. I should.

I thought it was something, but then when I redid my kitchen and went to cut it, it's black and stone, right? It's sort of this brownish thing. Stone? No, I don't think it's a real stone. Oh, okay. You went to cut it and did it just like completely mangle your axel? No, because I got the right kind of blade.

I did my research. Okay. But it was, it was not what I thought it was and it's impossible to find this stuff now. Oh yeah. So we're just, I kind of, uh, Are you going to redo your countertops? Well, at some point we have to. Are you going to redo them?

No. Okay. I was going to say that's, wow. That's a project right there. I tried to make my own concrete countertop, you know, those, yeah, cool. Yeah. And you can do it yourself. I didn't know that.

Yeah. I didn't know how to pour the stuff and, um, but it was, uh, it turned out okay for a first try, but not good enough. Yeah. You don't want okay for the first try for your kitchen counters and man, that stuff is heavy. Yeah. It's concrete and breaks easily.

If you drop it or if you just like are carving a turkey on it, if it's, if you have too long of a piece and like you just have a person on each end, it can snap in half, you know, you need a short person in the middle. Yeah. With a hard head. Uh, anyway, beta particles, uh, like we said, where were we, uh, what they can move through. Um, the problem with the beta particles is they're tiny, 8,000 times smaller than the alpha particle.

Uh, and that means it can penetrate through your clothing into your skin. This is the stuff that if it enters the local food supply or the groundwater, uh, and it gets in the body that way, you can inhale it, then you're in big trouble. Right. Anytime this stuff gets into your body, you're in big trouble. Yeah. And we should, do you want to talk real quick here about the difference between irradiation and contamination?

Did you see that? Yeah. Well, let's finish gamma quickly. Cause I feel like gamma is just sort of sitting out there and sad. Yeah. Gamma smash. Uh, gamma rays, they're the most dangerous, very high energy, uh, and can travel through most anything, which is why anything with gamma rays is going to be lined with like

a few inches of lead or several feet of concrete or both, uh, to block those gamma rays. Um, and this is the stuff that gets in your bone marrow and your toast. Yeah. This stuff just goes right through your body all the way through. And as it does, it's, it's just think of like these radioactive particles as tiny bullets yeah that are ricocheting around electron seeking bullets or just going after your atoms with the vengeance, dying hard with the vengeance. So contamination versus irradiation, uh, that's two ways that you can be dosed and they're

both a little different. Yeah. So, so, uh, contamination is what it sounds like. It's where you actually have, uh, some sort of radioactive material, maybe like a liquid or a powder or something. Yeah. On your body, on your clothing, in your body is even worse. But you are for all intents and purposes radioactive.

You can transfer that radioactivity to other people. Yeah. You're contaminated. Yeah. And like you said, it's still pinging around in your body. Yeah. When it gets into your body, it can be transported through your blood, through other, um, processes to transport processes in your body.

And it's just wreaking havoc everywhere. Yeah. Um, and it wreaks the most havoc on places where cells regenerate the fastest, um, because the damage is done and spread more quickly, right? Yeah. Um, but that's contamination. Your radioactive, you can spread the radioactivity if you're contaminated. Irradiation is different.

Yeah. That's when, like when you go to get your chest x-rayed, you are technically getting irradiation, uh, irradiated, irradiated. The difference is you're not coming into actual contact. And when the source is turned, when they shut off that machine, it's over. Right. You're no longer, you're not radioactive, so you can't make other people radioactive. And you're, you're not just sitting there with radioactive particles in your body.

No. It's done. It's done. Leave it in the past. That's right. Is the motto of irradiation. Yeah. Why are we still talking about it?

So they're, they're different, right? Um, and there, there are different ways you can get contaminated. But I mean, if you stood there in front of an x-ray machine long enough, you wouldn't be contaminated, but you could still have an, you could still develop acute radiation poisoning. Yeah. Um, because the length of exposure would be long enough. Yeah.

Because you're just standing there like a jackass in front of an x-ray machine turned on. Yeah. It's your problem. Move to the side. And x-rays are safe, but I still get a little weirded out every time I go in there and like they put the lead vest on and then run out of the room, like they detonated a bomb. Yeah.

I'm always like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah. Um, especially like the mouth ones in your teeth, which have gotten obviously a lot of. You are supposed to, um, and I know you're in a, you're in a ticklish situation in that case, but the dentists like to take a lot of x-rays. Is that because they can charge and get insurance money? 100%. Very, I'm sure there are plenty of instances where you, they do need a new set of x-rays

or whatever and you do need to get them, but you should be, um, a lot more prone to calling your last dentist. If you're moving dentists and saying, I need you to transfer those x-rays and they should do it for free willingly. Yeah. So you don't have to get another set, you know, if you change dentists, you know, within a single year, you shouldn't have too many x-rays. No, I agree.

Just cut down on that whenever you can. I've always had the suspicion that they give you the maximum allowable number of x-rays that they can bill for. I didn't know if I was just being cynical or if that's a real thing. No. And I feel like dentists as a profession have really gotten into upselling in the last like decade. Like really upselling.

I'm not saying anything you had done was upselling, but like there's a lot of like offers and there's a lot of marketing that goes on during the average dental visit now. Yeah. But it's coming from the dentist. There's a special liquid that they had, it may be fluoride now that I think about it. Some, you know, thing that they say and now here's your thing and they say rinse with this for a minute and then you go leave and it's like $50 for this rinse treatment. I'm like, you didn't even ask me if I wanted that.

So this last time I went, I have to go four times a year now because I have short roots, which is my worst nightmare to have to double the amount of time at the dentist. I hate it. And that's not including any of my stupid tooth stuff. This is just for cleanings. Oh, I see. Like I just have to go in four times a year now for cleanings. Geez.

Do you have your own chair? I do. I should. I certainly bought one at this point. But I went in this last time. I was like, all right, I'm not going to, I'm going to decline that rinse. I was so ready to fight with this lady and she didn't give it to me. I think they can sense that.

Really? They can sense when you're paying attention, wins a good time to upsell, wins a good, you got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them is the new motto for dentistry. All right. Well, we got on this because of x-rays and we're going to take a break and stop venting our frustrations and come back and talk a little bit more about ionizing radiation. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. You know, it really stinks. The dentist. Just kidding. Um, so Ed points out, if you're going to talk about, uh, radiation poisoning, um, what you're looking at is a total dosage and that includes different factors like what it came from. Like we talked about with the alpha or beta or gamma rays, um, how much it was, how long

you were exposed, uh, how much was absorbed. It's not a exact science. It's taken as a total accumulative effect. Right. But the, the, the severt, which takes all those things into account is it's pretty close to exact science as far as measuring human absorption of radiation, right? Yeah. And so based on these calculations, which I couldn't find anywhere, how you calculate

severts specifically, but apparently there are people who know how to do this, right? And when you calculate severts, you're able to say, oh, okay, well, just flying in an airplane, get you X number of millisieverts or microsieverts on a five hour airplane flight or something like that. Right. Um, and we, we've come to realize that just living on planet earth, we are exposed to background radiation on the order of something like, um, I think 3.6 millisieverts per year. Yeah.

That's 0.0036 severts. Right. And that's, that's fine. You can totally deal with that. It's when you start getting closer and closer to a full severt, because if you'll notice things, sever or radiation exposure is measured in millisieverts and even microsieverts a millionth of a severt, which we love those numbers. And we should say, you know, if you're getting an X-ray at the dentist or something like

that, you're getting a low level of, of, um, exposure to potentially deadly radiation. If, if it were just, if you were standing next to what's producing the X-rays outside of an X-ray machine and you were holding that, you'd be in big trouble. The fact is you're not exposed to it like that. You're exposed to doses that as far as we understand scientifically right now, the human can take and it's not going to have any adverse effects. It's when you start getting closer to a full severt that you really run the risk of acute radiation poisoning.

Yeah. Like 0.75 severts will get you sick and weaken your immune system. Three severts, uh, you need medical attention or you will probably die. Yeah. But you will probably live if you do have medical care. If you get a dose of 10 severts at once, you are dead. Even if you do get medical care, that's like a death sentence, basically. But you're not going to encounter that at all.

So you don't need to worry about that unless you work in a lab or something and there's an accident. Yeah. Which we'll talk about some of those that have happened, but, um, 10 severts is really bad news. 10 severts. You're toast. Yeah.

Um, between 10, I'm sorry, between one and 10, you got about a 50-50 chance of dying within a month. And if it's, uh, a less, if it's not just one big blast and it's over time, then it's, your odds are a little bit better. Totally different. That's a totally different, like prolonged exposure is different than the kind of acute exposure that, that creates radiation sickness, right? Correct.

And Ed points out too that the, the factors that are included in the formulation of a sever, a radiation dose is, they're not absolute. It's not like, Hey buddy, here's 10 doses or here's 10 severts of radiation, you're toast. Right. It would be slightly, I think that actually probably is absolute, but let's say two. Yeah. It's going to be different depending on where you were exposed, what part of your body,

how old you are, what kind of immune health you have, um, and a number of different factors, the type of particle that you're exposed to. So it's different, but for the most part, once you get higher and higher along the sever at scale, it does become kind of absolute as far as human mortality is concerned. Yeah. Uh, if you do get exposed, uh, you're going to get sick very, very quickly. Um, I mean, sometimes it's like you immediately start vomiting or lose consciousness. Yeah.

Your body is just so immediately poisoned. Yeah. Um, it's hardcore, uh, nausea, diarrhea, headache, fever. Um, like you said, you can be knocked unconscious and I looked everywhere to find out what happens that makes you lose consciousness. And I have the impression that they don't really know. It doesn't make sense. What, what about radiation makes you lose consciousness unless it just completely alters the effects

of your, or that the action of your neurons, I guess. Yeah. See, you get a little more inquisitive about that stuff. I hear that and I just think, yeah, your brain just overloads. Well, no, I'm like, what happened? Why that, why that, why that person just lose consciousness by being exposed to an x-ray machine? That's not good.

What's the science behind that? Uh, that's what I sound like in my head. Um, burns on the body. We talked about external exposure, um, bad scarring. Uh, there's something called a latent period after that initial, uh, set of symptoms. Yeah. This is just mean where you don't have symptoms. Yeah.

You get better. Yeah. You get away, but I don't think anyone thinks they're going to get better because they know about the, the low now, but I'll bet the first few people who died from radiation sickness are like, wow, this is miraculous. Right. And then the, yeah. So the, the initial symptoms are very obvious and very bad.

And then there's that latent period. Like you said, it was a low, a few weeks even. Yeah. And apparently what's going on at that point is the damage that has been done immediately. And I mean, like when, for example, your DNA is altered, it happens on the, in the billions trillions of a second that, that damage is done. Yeah. If a free radical is created, it still takes on the order of like a second to, to do this

damage. So it's very quick, but the effects of that damage take a little while to appear. But when they, when they do appear, it's like, Oh man, you're, you're having multi-organ failure right now because you were exposed to so much ionizing radiation. Your cells were so totally altered. And your DNA was ultimately altered too, that your body's not functioning properly. And some parts of your body are definitely more susceptible than others. Like I said, the ones where cells replicate more frequently, like the lining of your gut.

Right. And that's a big problem if your guts messed up. Oh yeah. Cause you're prone to infections. Yeah. Which is not good. You don't want a gut infection. No you don't.

I had one of those. I did. You had staff, a staff stomach infection and I've never seen a human being sicker than you were. And you had to fly home. Do you remember? Oh yeah. You had to get on a plane as that was hitting you.

I felt so bad, dude. It was pretty bad. You were green. Yeah. Green. Your face was green. Like the Hulk. Like the Hulk.

You had a gamma ray burst of radiation. I had a gamma ray burst in my shorts. Gross. It's so gross. Standing up. Standing up, sitting down, lying down. I got you. Everywhere.

So that latent period, if it's shorter, the smaller the dose, wait, shorter the larger the dose, the latent period. Yeah. And in fact, if you get dose with more than 10, there is no latent period at all. Right. It doesn't take a break. No. You're just one way.

Toast. Yeah. And like you said, after that latent period wears off is when it's really clear what's happened inside your body. And one thing we haven't specifically talked about yet is your bone marrow, which is a very bad place to get radiation poisoning because it basically, that's where you produce blood cells to make your body better. And it basically shuts down your immune system because there's so much damage and now you

can't even make yourself better or try to make yourself better. Yeah. It either directly damages the cells and kills them, right? Yes. So therefore you're just not making as many cells. You don't have as many white blood cells. And then it also can damage the DNA in your cells so that when it is making more white blood cells, it's not making them correctly.

So there's malfunctioning white blood cells. So yeah, your immune system's toast. You're anemic at that point. Yeah. Well, that's from the red blood cells being affected as well. Yeah. And then again, when your gut gets assaulted, you got a lot of bacteria in your gut and it's beneficial so long as it's in your gut.

When it leaks into the rest of your body, you can get blood infections from that because the stomach lining is not protecting your stomach like it's supposed to any longer. Yeah. It's bad news, man. It is bad news. All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll talk about some of these tragedies and accidents when we get back.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give

me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, um, we know actually fortunately very little about the effects of ionizing radiation on the human body because there's not that many people who have died from it. Actually everything we know comes from industrial accidents like Three Mile Island or Fukushima. And then the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which by the way, anytime that

comes up, I feel it's totally worth mentioning going to see the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Like I think everybody in the world should have to go to this. It's so well done. Really? It's so ghastly. It's the stuff that they're showing. Oh, I'm sure. It's basically Hiroshima saying, this happened to us so we're going to take this terrible

gift that was bestowed on us and turn it into a way to keep it from ever happening again. And that's what they did with it. Do you ever in Japan make a trip to Hiroshima to check it out? We'll talk about those then since we're there. I ran across a cool article on a website called Today I Found Out, which is a neat site. You ever been there? Oh yeah. It's pretty cool.

And this was called Why Can People Live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Now, but Not Chernobyl? So here's a little background and I think it should have its own podcast at some point for sure. Which one? The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But here's a short version. On August 6, 1945, the bomb Little Boy was a uranium bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima, 140 pounds of uranium, but these were detonated both of them were above each city.

It's like 2,000 feet above Hiroshima, only two pounds of the 140 pounds underwent nuclear fission and then 16 kilotons of explosive force. So because Hiroshima was on a plane, it caused a lot of damage, estimated 70,000 people were killed on that day, period, 70,000. Another 70,000 injured and about 70% of the buildings gone. For Fat Man, which was a few days later on Nagasaki on August 9, only two pounds, this was plutonium and only two pounds of that underwent fission and that was about 1,600 feet in the air, but because it's a valley, a lot of the city was protected, still killed

about between 45,000 and 70,000 people immediately. And I get the feeling that a lot of that stuff was just the blast impact for these were just so immense. Or the burns were so bad. Yeah. So, bring in Chernobyl because this article compares the conditions there, these places. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, a nuclear disaster that had, the way they say in this article was that the reactors had a built-in instability was the quote.

So basically when the reaction got hotter and hotter, the coolant would decrease and just make everything less stable and they couldn't control it. So they did some, went to do some tests one day on April 26, 1986 to see how long these turbines would run after the reactor was down. So in order to do this, they had to turn off all these safety controls and remove, you know, I think we talked about the control rods and how nuclear meltdown works. Yeah, how nuclear meltdown works. So these control rods absorb the neutrons and limit the reaction.

They had to remove, geez, how many? Only all but six of the 205 control rods for this test and they shut down the safety system. Geez. So it was just ready for disaster basically. Why were they doing that? Just for fun? No, they were trying to see how long these turbines would run once everything was shut

down. But in order to do that, you had to do all these other things. That's like figuring out how much weight a bridge can take by driving increasingly heavy trucks across it until it collapses. Yeah, and systematically weakening it as you do it. That's insane. Yeah, it was not a good idea. And they said it all came down to like the hubris of the people who designed it and were

working there. Yeah, it was totally preventable. So a lot of these graphite rods, they tried to put them back in there and they fractured because there was a design flaw in them and there was an explosion. It basically just blew it up, seven to 10 tons of nuclear fuel were released that day only. 28 people died immediately and over 90,000 square miles of land were contaminated. How many people died immediately?

28 that were just like in the area. And of course, you can't get accurate numbers on fallout since then because they're not really sharing that information. But by 2005, there were 7,000 cases of thyroid cancer in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia alone. So obviously it had an effect. But nowadays people can live in Japan and those two places and they say that the levels of background radiation are basically like anywhere else in the world.

But Chernobyl is still, they have a zone where you can't live there at all anymore. So the difference is basically the amount of fuel, only two pounds like I said of each of those bombs, only two pounds underwent fission and there was 180 tons of nuclear fuel released at Chernobyl. That's crazy that there's any of Chernobyl even left. They just blow up the whole town. Well and they're studying, well I think the explosion wasn't anything like Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

I got you. It just blew the stuff into the air. Yeah. I got you. But they're studying that area now because it's a big, you know, like you said, you don't have this opportunity to see what it means for the ecology of that area and the ecosystem. And like they found some things have like adapted and are thriving. And lately there have been reports that there are like animals there living.

Like bears? Yeah, like normal animals that aren't, you know, three-eyed bears and stuff like that. No blinky of the fish? And the other difference was that it was on the ground and these other, you know, the bombs are detonated 2,000 feet in the air. So while it's airborne, it just has a bigger impact obviously if it's like literally ground level. So that's sort of the deal on why you can not live in Chernobyl anytime soon.

Yeah, they're finally entombing the reactor that's, it's just, yeah, I mean, they tried before, but they did a pretty terrible job of it and it was already leaking and cracking. So now they're building, I think other countries are helping them with it. They're building like this huge tomb to go around it so nobody can enter for, I think at least a century. Geez. Yeah. Well, there have been some scientists too though that had minor, well, not minor for

them, but minor accidents and labs that were exposed heavily. Like the stuff that created, that led to their deaths were just so small. With anything else, you would probably even barely notice that you'd messed up, but these guys died because of it. Yeah. Two dudes notably working on the same core, plutonium core, but not at the same time. Like a year apart. Yeah.

And it came to be called the demon core for that reason because it killed two people. Yeah. It was a physicist named Harry K. Daglian, Jr. He got a 5.1 severt exposure in 1945 and died 25 days later. And who's the other guy? Lewis Slotin. Yeah. Slotin, he was basically messing with the core with a screwdriver from what I read and

the screwdriver just barely slipped just a little bit. And I guess it allowed the cover to come in contact with the core and the core went subcritical for half a second. Wow. He luckily was able to throw the core off, so it didn't really lead to an even bigger problem that killed more people, but it led to his death and he got a 21 severt dose. We've been saying 10 is almost instantly fatal. He lost consciousness and threw up immediately and he died, I think, nine days later.

Yeah. That long. Yeah. But the air turned blue around him. Yeah. And there was a visible wave of heat. Yeah. And he was immediately after his death, I think he was praised for containing the accident.

But then later on, even after that, they were like, yeah, but he did something wrong that led to it to begin with. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it was kind of a, you did a good job, but you shouldn't have done it. Well, what said, it also killed somebody else, a guard who was in the room died years later from cancer that they're like, that was definitely from exposure. Yeah.

It doesn't surprise me. Yeah. So what happens if you, I mean, how can they treat this stuff? Surprisingly, they can treat it. Like if you think about radioactive particles entering your body, you just think it'd be like, well, here's some morphine, I hope you had a nice life, but there's actually stuff they can do to treat it. And one of the first things they do, if you're contaminated is they wash you off.

Right. Seems like a good step one because you can get some of that stuff off. But if it's in your body, they have to give you drugs that are known to actually bind to radioactive materials and then flush out of your system. Yeah. Like Prussian blue dye is actually good for cesium and thallium poisoning. It's like, it's a blue dye that goes in and it binds to the stuff and holds it. So it's no longer going through your body, leaking havoc.

Since you're coming with me. Then you poop it out. Yep. And there's another one, you're going to try this one? Oh, diethylene, triamine, pentatelsic acid. Is that bad? Or DTPA? Bentacetic acid.

That was the easier part. Yeah. Let's call it that. So that one's good for plutonium among other things and they inject you with that. And it does basically the same thing. It seeks out those radioactive particles, binds to them and then you pee it out. So I mean, it is possible to treat people who've been contaminated with radioactive stuff.

I just want to point out, every time Josh said binds to them, you hug your stomach. What is that all about? I don't know. I hadn't really noticed I'd done that, but it's true. Both times. What else can they do? They can prevent infection if your immune system's compromised because of the bone marrow. You could have a bone, I'm sorry, blood transfusion if you only have a little bit of bone marrow

damage that could help you out. But if it is too severe, you would have to have a complete bone marrow transplant. And even then, you're not guaranteed to be okay. You're in pretty bad shape if that's going on. Did you read about this Goyana Brazil accident? I did. It is nuts. It's crazy.

So back in 1987, there were, I guess, some people who were just wandering around in abandoned hospital in Goyana, Brazil. There was two dudes scrap salesman, like scavenger salesman. Okay. So they found, I guess, maybe an X-ray machine or something like that and cracked it open. And there was a cake of glowing blue cesium inside. And they said, well, this looks pretty. Let's take it with us.

And they did. And they sold it to people, including some children who rubbed it on their skin so that they would glow in the dark. And a lot of these people died very shortly afterward. Yeah, they took, I mean, it wasn't just the raw stuff. They took the machine in a wheelbarrow and then spent the next few days, like, trying to take this machine apart to get to this glow because, I mean, they thought it was like supernatural.

They didn't know what it was. These dudes started vomiting and stuff, of course, went to the doctor and they're like, it's food poisoning. Here's a Coke. Go home. It's clams. Bad clams. So, one of the guys finally freed some of this glowing blue goo.

He thought it was gunpowder and tried to light it on fire. It didn't light. I guess it's not flammable. And then he sold it to a scrapyard, like you said, for 25 bucks. And this guy, the owner of the scrapyard, I think it was his uncle, was like, man, everyone come and see this. And he invited, like, for three days, like family and guests could all come over and look.

It was a little glitter. And like you said, this, I mean, it's really sad, but this guy's daughter was like rubbing it on her skin and her bedsheets and they were just enamored with this stuff. So, again, a lot of people died from this. Well, four people died. Four, still. It's a lot. No, four people died, but they, 249 people had significant levels of material in their

body and 112,000 people were examined. And they demolished several square city blocks. Just gone. They're like, this is contaminated. We have to get rid of it. They just leveled parts of that city. Yeah. It was crazy.

All because some guys, like, broke into an X-ray machine. Because somebody just left it in an abandoned hospital. Yeah. I think there were guards, but the guard was off duty or something. There still shouldn't be, like, X-ray machines in an abandoned hospital. Yeah, that was, I think, I think they ended up there being lawsuits. I would hope so. Yeah.

Man. So that's it, right? I got nothing else. I don't either. That's a radiation sickness. We hope that this saves you or someone you love. If you're ever going through an abandoned hospital and you come across an X-ray machine, don't crack it open.

Yeah. Just observe it from afar. Well, we always talk about exploring abandoned structures and it's super dangerous. Oh, yeah. They're all fraught with dangers. They definitely are. And probably one you wouldn't think about with something like this. Yeah.

You know? Have I ever talked about grossingers? I don't think so. Man, there's this one side about grossingers. It's just amazing. What's grossingers? It's a Catskills resort that was abandoned in the 80s. Now it's almost completely reclaimed by the forest, but about 5, 10 years ago, somebody

went and documented it at peak decay where the structures are still there but just totally coming in. It's so creepy. Why is it so fascinating? I don't know. I can't remember what the name of the site is, but it's grossingers. And this guy went many, many years or many times over the years and documented it. And I think his dad was the caretaker there as the place was shutting down.

So he knew the place really well. And he has old photos from while it was still in use to compare and contrast. It's just amazing. Wow. I thought you were going to say it was completely overtaken now by forest fairies and imps. Yeah, that's what I meant. And the Hulk. Have you ever seen Hulk Hodgman?

What? It's a Twitter account where it's like, stuff Hodgman says or would say, yeah, but as the Hulk. Wow. I mean, I've heard the Hulk for other things, but not mine. There's one for Hodgman. I'm not sure how he feels about it. You've got to check it out.

Boy, my mind is swirling. All right. Did you say listener mail? Oh, no. If you want to know more about radiation sickness, you can type those words in the search bar at how stuff works. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this something I never really thought about before.

Hey guys, I'm a loyal listener from the very beginning. I've listened to every podcast and watched all of your TV shows, episodes. Wow. And most, if not all of your internet roundups. How about that? This person is a serious man. Yeah. I'm writing about a very serious topic and one that is dear to my heart.

The high rate of physician and medical student suicide. This one of the highest stress careers in terms of training, debt, work schedule and trying not to take on the stress of every one of your patients that you see. You are not allowed, I'm sorry, we, she's speaking first person, we are not allowed to have any mental health weaknesses where we risk being labeled a liability by the medical board, our employers, our peers and even our own patients. I never really thought about that, you know, you can't like. Stoic doctors is what everybody wants.

Our school, see I want a wacky doctor. Like Patch Adams? Yeah, like a whoopee cushion or a joy buzzer every now and then. Our schooling and training are grueling, it can be emotional roller coaster, we're sleep deprived, made to feel inadequate on a daily basis and often humiliated and belittled in front of our peers. She said it was tougher than 11 years in the army. Jeez.

We're supposed to convince our patients to seek help when they need it, but we are certain to harm our own careers if we personally reach out for help. So she said that in recent years she had a hit close to home, classmate committed suicide before graduating and his parents have spoken out and have gotten together with a filmmaker to create a documentary called Do No Harm, exposing the silent epidemic. So they have a lot of support, you can go to their Facebook page, facebook.com slash Do No Harm, the film and they have a Kickstarter that you can look up. If you just Google Kickstarter, Do No Harm Documentary, they're really close.

That's great. Just a couple of thousand away from their finishing points. So I think they are going to, maybe even by this time it will be done, but if anyone out there felt like throwing a few dollars their way, that would be great. So that's from Brooklyn Bertels, a fourth year medical student. Thanks a lot Brooklyn. That was a great email. It took a really turn at the beginning.

Yeah, right. Yeah, so thanks for that. And if you guys want, you can go help that Kickstarter out. If you want to hang out with us, you can hang out with us on Twitter at syskpodcast and the same for Instagram. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.