Top Medication For a Nuclear War or Meltdown

I have recently done a lot of research on the subject and I shall say that it is not as bad as I might have thought, there actually are medication for the removal of particles emitting radiation in the body. Before we get into the juicy details of what is the name of the medication, how much it costs and how to get your hands on some, let's discuss what radiation does to your body.

For most people radiation is pure magic and it is very feared because it cannot be seen, heard, smelled, felt or tasted until you have way too much of it in your body. Maybe I'll go into more detail on the effects of radiation in your body but to keep the purpose of this post on medication I'll be brief.

Radiation is not a danger in itself, it's when it is emitted from tiny particles in the air that it becomes dangerous. Now imagine that some nuclear device went off and sent tons of dust and ash in the air that all move with the wind. These particles are radioactive and breathing them in or having them on your clothes or skin is subjecting you to radiation. The most danger from radiation on the long term is breathing or ingesting radiation particles that will attach themselves to parts of you body and send radiation to your organs from the inside. Wherever you go and however good you wash yourself, you will still be subjected to the radiation. This where the medication comes in, it can be used to shield or block certain types of radiation from attaching themselves inside your body. Certain types or nuclear devices emit different types of ''radionuclides'', that is different types of radioactive elements. As an example the most common type and most well known, radioactive iodine will attach itself to the thyroid gland as almost all iodine you ingest goes to this gland. If you were to ingest or breath radioactive iodine particles, your body won't make the difference between it and plain iodine and it would saturate your thyroid. Your thyroid would start to emit radiation from all the radioactive iodine stored in it and you would be subject to that radiation everyday whatever you do. Since the thyroid is in your neck, common results of a radioactive thyroid would be a thyroid cancer. The thyroid being a very important part of your energy's and metabolism regulation you can imagine that not very good things happen if it stops working.

So now that I've explained the concept let's get down to the juicy details. Here is a list of the medication available for different radionuclides:

• Potassium Iodine (KI) for Radioactive Iodine (Iodine-131)
• Prussian Blue (Radiogardase) for Radioactive Thallium-201 or Cesium137
• DTPA (Pentetate Calcium/Zinc Trisodium) for Radioactive Plutonium, Americium, and Curium

There are more than the above three medications available to help decontaminate or aid in the recovery of radioactive fallout contamination. The reason they are not included here is either that the likelihood to get contaminated is almost null or that they require very special equipment and treatment which you kill the whole point of learning how to administer them yourself. This includes Deferoxamine (Desferal) used as a chelating agent to trap Radioactive Iron. It works the same way that DTPA (Pentetate Calcium/Zinc Trisodium) traps Radioactive Plutonium, Americium, and Curium. The chance of being contaminated with radioactive Iron is extremely rare so stocking up on Deferoxamine (Desferal) would be pretty useless. There is also Filgrastim (Neupogen) which is used to aid in the recovery of radiation contamination. It promotes the creation of new red and white blood cells after the bone marrow has been damaged by radiation. However, Filgrastim (Neupogen) is very complicated to administer and requires hospital quality equipment and knowledge.

Now this post is already very long and in order to completely cover each solution one by one, each one will have it's own dedicated post, and all comments and discussion orientated at a specific solution should be posted in the specific post.


Sources: 

• EThreat Manual 2009 (National Kapodistrian University of Athens) (p.96 to p103)
• Nuclear Radiation and the Thyroid (American Thyroid Association)