Comments on: Dangerous Blood http://www.politedissent.com/archives/1013 a blog of medicine, comics, television, science and other fun stuff Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:50:22 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Scott http://www.politedissent.com/archives/1013/comment-page-1#comment-5062 Scott Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:35:45 +0000 http://politedissent.com/archives/1013#comment-5062 I was going to write something about Spider-Man's radioactive blood perhaps not being infective as having a really long half-life, but then it occurred to me that even if it was based on isotopes with long radioactive half-lives, such as Carbon-14, almost any isotope is going to have a much shorter *biologic* half-life in the human body, there bieng no mechanism for selective retention of the isotope over the regular form of the atom. Hm. I was going to write something about Spider-Man’s radioactive blood perhaps not being infective as having a really long half-life, but then it occurred to me that even if it was based on isotopes with long radioactive half-lives, such as Carbon-14, almost any isotope is going to have a much shorter *biologic* half-life in the human body, there bieng no mechanism for selective retention of the isotope over the regular form of the atom. Hm.

]]> By: Bardiac http://www.politedissent.com/archives/1013/comment-page-1#comment-5056 Bardiac Tue, 06 Dec 2005 04:12:31 +0000 http://politedissent.com/archives/1013#comment-5056 You could connect this back to your review of the most recent House episode, where one of the duclings got exposed to blood from an HIV positive patient. How much virus is in a thimbleful of blood? Vs how much potential bad blood radiation? And yay for giving blood! You get some virtual karma points :) (That sounds sort of dismissive, but I don't mean it to. Giving blood is GREAT!) You could connect this back to your review of the most recent House episode, where one of the duclings got exposed to blood from an HIV positive patient.

How much virus is in a thimbleful of blood? Vs how much potential bad blood radiation?

And yay for giving blood! You get some virtual karma points :) (That sounds sort of dismissive, but I don’t mean it to. Giving blood is GREAT!)

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