Iodine Dispensed to Children : Poles Angry, Fearful as They Face Fallout

Amid thundershowers that spread Soviet radioactive fallout from the air over a wide area of Poland, thousands of children, from infants in their mothers’ arms to teen-age students, lined up Wednesday for doses of a bitter, brown iodine solution to guard against the effects of radiation.

A government statement read on the evening television news--the second in two days--said the distribution of iodine will be expanded from Warsaw and areas of northeastern Poland to encompass all children up to age 16.

According to official statistics, 10.4 million of Poland’s 38 million people are age 16 or under.

The government continued, however, to assure the public that radioactive contamination from a Soviet nuclear-reactor accident remains far below hazardous levels, that it is stable or declining in most areas, and that protective measures are only precautionary.

‘Clear Conscience’

“With a clear conscience, I can tell you this is a matter that could have been ignored,” the head of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, Zbigniew Jaworowski, said on a nationally televised program Wednesday evening.

Earlier in the day, parents who waited three hours and more with their children in lines outside public health clinics in Warsaw reflected a public mood of fear, fatalism and anger at the effects of the reactor disaster at Chernobyl, 280 miles from the Polish border in the Soviet Ukraine.

“I am so frightened. I don’t know what is to happen,” a Warsaw mother of three said in halting English. “I want to go somewhere, but where to go?”

On the other hand, she said, her brother in Katowice, where industrial air and water pollution is among the worst in Europe, takes a fatalistic view. “He says if the air hasn’t killed him yet, this won’t make any difference.”

Some were bitter in blaming the Soviets not only for letting the disaster happen but for failing to warn other countries--including, to all appearances, their Polish allies--of the potential danger that lay in a wind-borne cloud of fallout that by Wednesday was detectable on a 2,000-mile arc from Austria to Finland.

“Can you imagine?” said one father, a technician in his 30s. “Telling no one? They are bandits, madmen.” A doctor helping to distribute iodine to clinics in the capital said “parents are terrified” by the contamination, in part because the authorities have provided virtually no detailed information about its extent or hazard.

Biggest Worry Is Iodine

The government’s concern has focused on radioactive iodine, a major but short-lived component of fallout that tends to accumulate in the thyroid gland, where it can lead to an increased risk of cancer years later. Children are particularly vulnerable.

The doctor was among several phyicians who said their greatest concern now is that parents might try to obtain multiple doses of iodine for their children on the theory that more is better, without realizing that excessive amounts of iodine are toxic and potentially lethal. Polish news media, however, have failed to explain this point.

Some parents waiting in line at a clinic on Malczewskiego Street in southern Warsaw said they had already given their infants a few drops of tincture of iodine, the household remedy for cuts, diluted in tea.

The purpose of the iodine, given in graduated doses according to a child’s age, is to make the child excrete the excess, and thus prevent the absorption of any radioactive iodine from air, water or food.

Restrictions on Milk

In addition to dispensing iodine to children, the government has restricted sales of milk from grass-fed cows and warned the public to take special care in washing fresh fruits and vegetables.

There were reports that the authorities in parts of northeastern Poland, closest to the Soviet border, have also urged the population to take daily showers to remove possible particles of fallout.

Because of its proximity to the accident, Poland may have received a heavier dose of fission wastes than Scandinavian countries, where an invisible plume of fallout from the burning Soviet reactor was first detected on Sunday. Poland is the only country outside the Soviet Union so far to issue medication to protect the public against radioactive iodine.

Whether the Soviet Union itself has taken similar measures is not known.

Evidence of Decline

While taking what it calls precautionary steps, the Polish government continues to insist that radiation levels remain well below the hazardous level and have begun to decline.

Radiation data made available to some Western embassies tended to support these claims. Western diplomatic sources said they understood that radiation readings were 5 to 25 times the normal background level, with the higher readings found in northeast Poland. This compares to 2.5 times the normal background reported from West Berlin and 5 to 10 times the normal level measured on a broad front in Scandinavia.

An independent Polish source with access to the data said radiation in Warsaw was about 15 times normal on Tuesday.

To put these readings in perspective, one Western science attache said that exposure to radiation 20 times the natural background intensity for a 10-day period--about as long as the current contamination is expected to persist--would result in a total dose of 70 millirems. He said this is almost exactly what the average American receives each year from medical and dental X-rays, according to a standard reference published in 1972 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Rain May Raise Levels

However, widely scattered rainshowers across southern and central Poland were expected to wash some airborne radioactivity to the ground, causing readings to rise for a short time before declining again. Showers on the west coast of Finland on Tuesday reportedly pushed radiation readings to 100 times normal, a level Finnish authorities said was still not considered hazardous.

A general lack of information from the Polish authorities has heightened public anxiety and led many Poles to speculate that the government is trying to minimize a dangerous situation over which it had no control. Others suggested the government is trying, without much success, to avoid spoiling a carefully cultivated holiday mood before May Day, the most important date on the official political calendar.

In an effort to fill the information gap and reassure a frightened public, state television broadcast a taped, half-hour program Wednesday evening in which members of the special government commission dealing with the contamination fielded questions from Polish journalists.

Cloud Breaking Up

Jaworowski, the head of the central radiological laboratory, offered a bewildering array of radiation dosage figures that appeared generally consistent with those made available to Western embassies.

He also said the airborne contamination has broken into a number of separate “clouds” drifting over Europe, some of which are dissipating at high altitudes and others that will probably continue shedding fallout for several days.

“We are following what is happening very carefully, but from all the data we cannot say when this will end,” Jaworowski said. He added that the rain was, in fact, welcome news, as it would help cleanse the air.

Panic Buying

A respected pediatrician, Dr. Kyrstyna Bozkowa, of the government’s Institute of Mother and Child, assured pregnant women that there was “no reason for concern . . . no cause for abortion.” Nervous tension, she said, would do more harm to a fetus than existing levels of radiation.

The information program, however, came too late to avert panic buying in some stores. Supplies of powdered milk, butter and some other staples disappeared from some Warsaw shops by midday.

As always in a crisis, Poles have turned to foreign, short-wave stations for their news, battling with government jamming stations to tune in Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corp., among others. But even foreign radio was unable to penetrate the veil of secrecy and bland assurances that the Soviets have dropped over their smoldering reactor.

“Who knows what is going on over there (in the Soviet Union)? No one knows anything,” said a Polish physician directing the distribution of iodine in one district of Warsaw.

In Warsaw, doctors and pharmacists worked through Tuesday night to prepare bottles of potassium iodide solution for distribution through district hospitals to neighborhood clinics, schools and day-care centers.

Parents began lining up at some clinics as early as 7 a.m., but doctors were still delivering bottles of iodine solution in plastic shopping bags as late as 10:30.

“People worked all night to make up the solution, but we’ve got plenty of it, and it’s all going very smoothly,” said a hospital administrator in Warsaw’s Mokotow district, where 34,000 children were to receive a protective one-time dose by today.

Views on Iodine

Western embassies, meanwhile, advised the foreign community to avoid drinking milk and tap water, to wash fruits and vegetables carefully and to wash children’s hair and clothing daily to remove any contamination. But they said issuing iodine might do more harm than good at this point, unless levels rise again.

“If the accident began on Friday and the contamination reached Poland on Saturday, it should have been given on Monday,” one embassy doctor said.

“If there is to be any damage, it has already been done,” he said, and added that any mass-scale use of iodine risks a small number of side effects in hypersensitive children.

An undetermined number of foreign dependents, mainly pregnant women and mothers with small children, took the Polish “iodine campaign,” as the authorities are calling it, as a signal for prudence and left Wednesday on flights to Western Europe.

Poles, who cannot leave without laborious application for passports and visas, took refuge instead in anger and fatalism.

“Sure, go ahead, drink the milk,” said a woman clerk in a small neighborhood food store, with acid irony and a carefree wave of her arm.

“Haven’t you heard? Everything’s fine. It’s all under control. This milk is from Red (Communist) cows.”