Medicine: High Tea

The world’s food supply has become only slightly more radioactive since 1945, and in most categories of comestibles there is no slightest threat to health. So reported Dr. Edwin P. Laug and Chemist Wendell C. Wallace of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration last week. Standard of comparison was a collection of old canned foods, e.g., from Admiral Byrd’s caches in Antarctica (TIME, March 11, 1957). As expected, because fallout tends to concentrate on grass and thus get into browsing cows, there was some increase in radioactivity of milk and milk products. While this was so slight as to be no hazard now, Dr. Laug warned: “This first part of a continuing study shows that there is something to watch for.”

By far the greatest increase in radioactivity is in tea. In prenuclear days, tea was virtually radiation-free. Now its radioactivity has gone up an average of 30-fold, and in some samples more than 100-fold. As expected, teas from South America and Africa show the least increase (the whole Southern Hemisphere has markedly less fallout than the Northern). Teas from China, Formosa and Japan may easily reflect mainly the fallout from Soviet bomb tests. Those from India and Ceylon can apparently only reflect the pooled fallout from Siberia, the Pacific islands and Nevada, which has gone around the world. Two reasons for tea’s high count: the plant takes up minerals from the soil with great avidity, and the leaves are not washed to free them of last-minute fallout.