HaHa Newsletter No.4
September 28,2018
Project Update

PDTN
HaHa,Inc.

Our Measuring Facility“HaHa Monitoring Station”
Chemical processing room draft chamber

Measurements on Milk Teeth Start SoonWith the help of more than 600 people across Japan and from overseas we were ﬁnally able to establish ourSr-90 measuring laboratory, “Haha Monitoring Station”. We are very grateful to everybody for their invaluable
support and encouragement!
Strontium-90 (Sr-90) behaves very much like calcium when it is inhaled or ingested; it is absorbed into bones
and teeth where it accumulates and is retained for decades. Sr-90 can cause leukemia, myeloma and solid
tumors such as pancreatic cancer. The central and local governments continue to ignore these risks.
That is why we set ourselves the objective of investigating the Sr-90 exposure of the population, particularly of
the children, who are at a signiﬁcantly higher risk of becoming diseased than adults. We began collecting shedmilk teeth from children in Japan shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. In September 2015 we founded the “Preserving Deciduous Teeth Network” and began our campaign to appeal to theJapanese people to support our eﬀorts to preserve milk teeth. Now that our own measuring laboratory, HaHa
Monitoring Station, has been established, we are about to commence our investigation to determine thecontamination level of the milk teeth we have collected.
Nuclear weapons tests performed in the 1950 to the 1960s caused the release of radioactive materials, including Strontium-90. In 1959 American scientists initiated the Baby Tooth Survey, in which deciduous teeth fromchildren living in the St. Louis, Missouri area, who were born in the 1950s and 1960s, were collected andanalyzed over a period of 12 years. The results of the survey showed that children born after 1963 had levels ofSr-90 in their teeth that were 50 times higher than those found in children before the advent of widespread
nuclear weapons testing. The ﬁndings helped convince US President John F Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty which ended all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water.
The Health Department of the State Laboratory Basel-City in Switzerland is well versed in methodology ofStrontium detection; since 1950 they have been measuring Sr-90 contamination in objects, such as deciduous
teeth, milk, soil and fresh water ﬁsh. We sought their international expertise, and our scientists participated intraining programmes organised by the State Lab, in 2017 and 2018.
The detection of Strontium is technically complex and very work-intensive, since the decay chain of Sr-90 andthe daughter nucleus Y-90 emit only beta rays. This requires complicated chemical processing facilities as wellas technical skills.
Thanks to your generous contributions which amounted 22,979,236 yen, we were able to purchase all necessary equipment, such as the electric furnace, the precipitation/ﬁltering apparatus, the Multi-Detector Low
Background Alpha/Beta Counting System(LB4200) and the measuring equipment, and set up our laboratory.
Prior to our milk teeth investigation, we are trialling measurements of Sr-90 levels in adultsʼ teeth, powder milk
and ﬁsh from contaminated areas.
Your continued generous support of our eﬀorts is greatly appreciated.

milk teeth

Slime ﬂounder and hard-shelled mussel(caught in the Ibaraki area)

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Ha Ha,Inc. E-mail:haha@ccn.aitai.ne.jp

HaHa Monitoring Station

LB4200E-mail:haha.akanabe@gmail.com

Preserving Deciduous Teeth Network E-mail:pdmn@gmail.com
http://www.hahainc.jp

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