Assessment of intake of 210Po and 210Pb isotopes from cow's milk in Poland

Milk has been known for its nutritional properties for centuries and is often the staple of the diet in many countries. Therefore, monitoring of milk composition seems to be a relevant task as it was the purpose of this study to compare levels of Po-210 and Pb-210 in several Polish voivodeships. The methodology was based on mineralization, loss on an inorganic matrix and concentration measurement on an alpha spectrometer. The concentrations of Po-210 and Pb-210 in collected milk samples were measured using alpha spectrometry and calculations, respectively. The results showed that the lowest concentration of Po-210 is 2.8 +/- 0.2 mBq l(-1) and the highest is 56.3 +/- 0.7 mBq l(-1) while the Pb-210 concentrations are in the range from 2.8 +/- 0.2 to 44.0 +/- 1.7 mBq l(-1). The associated annual effective doses for adults jmrange from 3.5 +/- 0.1 to 11.0 +/- 0.2 mu Sv a(-1) for Po-210 and from 2.0 +/- 0.1 to 5.0 +/- 0.1 mu Sv a(-1) for Pb-210. The lowest doses were noticed in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship and the highest values were found in Lesser Poland Voivodeship. The results show that the annual effective dose in individual provinces is not dangerous to health. However, there are significant differences between highly and lowly industrialized voivodeships.