A gift from the Irish government
In a fit of domestic goddessism, I tidied up our stash of medicines this morning. You have to do this regularly in France since any time you go to the doctors, you come home with four or five sets of pills and potions, most of which you don’t use. I’m grateful for their enthusiasm, and so no doubt are the pharmaceutical companies, but it can be over the top. In Ireland, if the doctor prescribed you a drug for ten days, say, the pharmacist would give you exactly that number of tablets. Here you get the drug in multiples of a hundred. OK, not quite, but you get the tablet in whatever quantity the manufacturers decide to box it in. This usually exceeds the amount you’ve been prescribed, and so the medicine stock starts to build up. As just one example, we had amassed four boxes of the exquisitely named exomuc, an expectorant as you might have guessed. So there was plenty of sorting out to do.
And I happened across this. It’s a packet of potassium iodate tablets that the Irish government issued to every household in 2000 (I think) as a way of getting at the UK government. The excuse for issuing them was so the Irish population would be protected in case of Sellafield having a meltdown or otherwise misbehaving. It was rather a token gesture. The six tablets provided would be enough for one dose for two adults and two kids. Irish families are generally larger than this so some members would have had to have been sacrificed. The tablets work by preventing your thyroid from absorbing harmful radiation from the atmosphere, at least for a while.
It was essentially an empty, political gesture, although I think a lot of people were touched by the Taoiseach’s thoughtfulness at the time. I shudder to think what it must have cost. Anti-radiation tablets don’t come cheap as I’ve discovered after a quick trawl on the Net. Anyway, time to dispose of them since they expired in 2005! Also, we’re a long way from Sellafield now.
I love the story of the irish anti-radiation tablets, thank god you didn’t have to sacrifice anyone in your family LOL!
I also have a medicine box that needs sorting…AGAIN. Who knew there were so many types of cough and cold before coming to France and that each one requires a different combination of drugs?! I’m getting to know them all now though and so yesterday at the Dr’s when she listed what my daughter would need, I knew I already had 2 of them and refused the 3rd (Exomuc funnily enough) as she’s never take it!!
Yes, I’m rather glad about that too!
You really ought to try to avoid all that domestic goddessism stuff; it’s not good for you and, who knows, it might catch on and then we’d all have to be at it and that wouldn’t do at all!
All the best
Keith
Don’t worry, I don’t do it too often so the world is safe for now!
I read recently that Sellafield is being mothballed soon. Mind you, I had a boyfriend who worked on the construction and before it was even completed they had leaks that they couldn’t find the source of….I’m glad I never lived nearby!
Chris worked next door to the nuclear power station at Hartlepool. During one of his medicals the nurse casually asked him if he’d finished his family. Chris replied he was just starting. Nurse was slightly concerned! Heaven knows what’s coming out of power stations, and maybe that explains everything about our children! However, I think nuclear plants are a necessary evil in these days of climate change.
I don’t think one dose would keep you going very long but of course there was a revival of interest in iodine tablets after the Japanese power station meltdown this year. I regularly clear out our medicine cabinet for the same reasons as you but I still find things dating back to 1992 that we brought with us from England and have somehow escaped the sorting out. What would I do without my ancient tube of Germolene?
Oh I miss Germolene so much! I love the smell.
I thought that Prof Jim Al-Khalili did a very good review of the Nuclear Power on BBC last week. Although the natural disaster in Japan killed tens of thousands and the consequential melt down has killed no-one, not even a worker at the plant, there is a knee jerk reaction to Nuclear Power and ‘lets close it down’. It all comes down to perception of risk, we see little risk as we drive around because we feel that we are in control, yet driving is one of our most dangerous activities, conversely we feel we have no control and do not understand things like radiation so we fear it and react emotionally.