Health
Beta particles are able to penetrate living matter to a certain extent and can change the structure of struck molecules. In most cases such change can be considered as damage with results possibly as severe as cancer and death. If the struck molecule is DNA it can show a spontaneous mutation.
Beta sources can be used in radiation therapy to kill cancer cells.
Read more about this topic: Beta Particle
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“To get time for civic work, for exercise, for neighborhood projects, reading or meditation, or just plain time to themselves, mothers need to hold out against the fairly recent but surprisingly entrenched myth that “good mothers” are constantly with their children. They will have to speak out at last about the demoralizing effect of spending day after day with small children, no matter how much they love them.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“In our great concern about the mental health of children, however, we have overlooked the mental health of mothers. They have been led to believe that their children’s needs must not be frustrated, and therefore all of their own normal angers, the normal ambivalences of living, are not permissible. The mother who has “bad” feelings toward her child is a bad mother.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The filth and noise of the crowded streets soon destroy the elasticity of health which belongs to the country boy.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)