Diet.
We have also attempted through the assistance of the Peace
Corps to find out quantitatively what infants and saall children eat.
(Such information will be of value to the professional nutritionists in
the Marshall Islands as well as to ourselves.) The Corps volunteers, all
of whom speak Marshallese, carried out inquiries on their own islands of
residence where they are familiar with the local scene and people, and
have lived for at least one year. The diets were ascertained by living
with a family for one day on two separate occasions and recording what
was eaten by the child (Note 13).
§
At present we have only the returns from 5 islands of 4 atolls,
comprising 21 children, 7 months to 4 years of age (but chiefly below
l year).
$The principal finding, as might have been expected, is that
children are breast fed until well past 6 months of age, in fact often
unto the [second] year.
A second important finding appears to be that additional foods
during the weaning period are often, if not usually, imported. The diet,
however, varies greatly from family to family, as well as from day to day
{to judge by these two-day samplings).
I have used Table 4.2 #2 and related material in calculating the
daily intake of cesiunm-137, from the individual diet reports. The two
reports for each child were averaged, and then an average obtained for
the island.
In the summary below, the island mean is followed by the
range, followed by the number of children, in parentheses.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Ine Island, Arno:
128 pCi/d (0-210; 3)
Buoz Island, Ailinglaplap:
Kaven Island, Maloelap:
Woja Island, Ailinglaplap:
Wotje Island, Wotje:
113
212
405
500
pci/d
pCi/d
pci/d
pCi/d
(0-215; 5)
(58-343; 3)
( 7-995; 9)
(215-785; 2)
The maximum individual daily intake of cesium-137 indicated by these
samples was not a constant one, but may be used to estimate what is
probably an upper bound for daily consumption. For 1000 pCi/d of
cesiun-137, the dose would be (1990):
(1000) x (1.1 x 1.7 x 1078)
=
.019 rem (committed first year dose)
Scaled to 1978, it would be .025 rem. The strontiuz-90 dose would be less
than 5% of this.
It is not claimed that these results are definitive. Nontheless, I
believe that these data do provide at the’ very least significant
orientation to the problem. Accurate data are very hard to obtain,
according to the volunteers, and the investment in time -- about 2 days
per child -- has been a very large one, indeed. One difficulty
encountered was getting the mothers to understand what kind of
information was wanted and why. No brief interrogatory visits could
obtain reliable data.
The study is still going on, and it is hoped that
more information will be available by October.
38
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