The government will set more stringent standards for radiation levels in food following new recommendations on the issue by the Food Safety Commission.
The government will set more stringent standards for radiation levels in food following new recommendations on the issue by the Food Safety Commission.
Health minister Yoko Komiyama said Oct. 27 the new standards would take effect early next year and would be more strict than the temporary ones now in place.
She cited the "need to secure food safety."
Komiyama's announcement came on the day the commission issued its new report revising its position on health dangers from radiation contaminated food.
According to the commission, health problems would emerge if accumulated radiation exposure over an individual's lifetime exceeded 100 millisieverts.
It revised past statements that the 100-millisievert limit included external exposure to radiation from the environment.
Commission members said appraising radiation exposure from the environment was outside of their jurisdiction. The lifetime figure of 100 millisieverts is based on the assumption that radiation exposure comes only from food and does not include any external radiation exposure.
The commission's recommendation will serve as the basis for new maximums for radiation levels in food from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which are expected to be ready early next year.
Health ministry officials will have to wrestle with how to incorporate health effects from external radiation exposure into the new guidelines. Parts of Fukushima Prefecture have recorded high levels of radiation following the disaster at the nuclear power plant there.
Another key issue is whether to issue different guidelines for different age groups. Children are more easily affected by radiation than adults, but there are concerns that establishing different standards for different ages will cause confusion among consumers.
Health ministry officials have estimated that if individuals ate food tainted with radioactive materials from the Fukushima nuclear accident for one year, the average level of radiation exposure across all age groups would be about 0.1 millisievert. Based on that estimate, a person who lived to 100 would be exposed to about 10 millisieverts of radiation over a lifetime.
The temporary food radiation standards now in place were calculated on the premise that total annual radiation exposure from food should not exceed 17 millisieverts. The temporary standards for vegetables and meat were set at 500 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram.
That standard was used by the farm ministry to decide if orders should be implemented to ban shipments of food products exceeding the standard.
According to calculations by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, if an adult consumed 200 grams of food containing 500 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram every day for a year, the total annual exposure amount would be about 0.5 millisievert.