Polish Children, Nursing Mothers Told to Avoid Leafy Vegetables

Airborne radioactivity has declined sharply, the Polish government said Thursday, but for the first time it warned pregnant women, nursing mothers and children to temporarily avoid eating fresh lettuce, spinach and other leafy vegetables.

In a statement published in state-run newspapers, the government also acknowledged that some city water supplies contained low levels of radioactivity. But it said the water was nevertheless safe to drink.

Drinking water from city supplies and wells is “not hazardous to health and is perfectly suitable for consumption,” the statement said. It urged the public not to believe rumors that water supplies are heavily contaminated, and it condemned the rumors as “deliberate disinformation.”

The warning against eating leafy vegetables such as lettuce and spinach marked a tightening of restrictions over those announced April 29, three days after the burning Soviet reactor at Chernobyl began to release a continent-wide cloud of contamination, mainly in the form of radioactive iodine 131.

The statement said that iodine in the air has largely disappeared but that some contamination in soil and water remains--and that this is now being taken up by the roots of fast-growing leaf vegetables. Since the iodine is inside the leaf, not on the surface, washing will not remove it.

Taking this into account, the special government commission monitoring the fallout recommended “temporarily refraining from or limiting the consumption of vegetables . . . by children, pregnant women and nursing mothers.”

Because iodine 131 disappears by half every eight days, Polish officials regard the problem as temporary. Sales of milk from grass-fed cows is still restricted, although the government said it could be used for industrial processing into cheese, butter and powdered milk. These have a long shelf-life, during which the iodine can decay to harmless levels.

General radioactivity, the statement said, has declined to between 0.05 millirems and 0.06 millirems per hour. These figures correspond to between three and four times natural background radiation, although the statement made no such comparison.

Instead, it compared the current readings to what it called an international limit of 10,000 millirems--equal to a dose of 10 rems--per year, apparently to emphasize the insignificance of the remaining contamination and calm a still-anxious population.

However, Western analysts said this is misleading, since the 10-rem standard usually applies to radiation workers, not the general public. The United States and a number of other countries limit the general population’s dosage from man-made sources of radiation to 170 millirems per year, which would be about the same as 0.02 millirems per hour over an entire year, or one-third the current maximum readings in Poland.

The government’s statement also said that the radioactive iodine content of the air has returned to normal, but at the same time it conceded that readings ranged up to 6.6 becquerels per cubic meter, a figure that is still above normal and about 1.8 times the maximum allowed in the United States.

The becquerel is a unit of radioactivity equal to the disintegration of one atom per second.