This, I think...

[randomness]

...is pretty much the opposite of the large friendly letters on the cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

(From the front page of the New York Daily News, today, Wednesday, 16 March 2011.)
It does look like people are taking the advice. Potassium iodide pills are selling out in the United States.

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12765401:

Fears of radiation sickness stemming from the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have prompted a surge in US sales of potassium iodide.

Pharmacies do not generally carry KI, but several manufacturers have reported being out of stock.

Online retailer nukepills.com said via its Twitter feed that it had sold out of KI pills on Tuesday.

It received 3,800 orders in 18 hours on Sunday and has shipped 50,000 pills to Tokyo, with the help of Harvard Medical School.

Debby Fleming Wurdack, co-owner of Fleming Pharmaceuticals, which produces a KI solution on demand, told the BBC the firm would be out of stock by the end of the day.

"This is insanity," Ms Fleming Wurdack said.

The company received more than 350 calls with orders from clients ranging from housewives to state governments on Tuesday, she said.

Ms Fleming Wurdack told the BBC that her company had ordered additional raw materials to manufacture more KI solution.

She expects the orders will continue for months.

From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42095558/ns/health-health_care/:

In the five minutes it takes to ask Troy Jones about a sudden shortage of potassium iodide pills to prevent radiation sickness, the North Carolina owner of http://www.nukepills.com already has logged nearly two dozen more orders.

“I’m now getting one every 30 seconds,” said Jones, 46, who has sold out of more than 50,000 doses of pills and liquid in days in the wake of fears of potential nuclear fallout from Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Despite expert assurances that nuclear radiation won’t reach the shores of America, demand for potassium iodide has swamped the stocks of all three manufacturers or suppliers approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration for use in the U.S.

Anbex, Inc., of Williamsburg, Va., sold out of IOSAT pills on Monday. Fleming & Co. Pharmaceuticals, of Fenton, Mo., which makes ThyroShield Solution is scrambling to make more. And Recipharm AB, the Swedish firm that makes lower-dose Thyro-Safe tablets estimates it will take weeks to replenish its stock.

“We’ve shipped more private orders in the last three days than we have in the last three years,” said Mark Quick, the vice president of corporate development for Recipharm.

Alan Morris, president of Anbex Inc., which manufactures the IOSET pills, said he hoped to produce and ship about 4.5 million tablets in the next few weeks, but admitted that the Japan disaster caught his company a bit off guard.

"The world seems to be utterly terrified of what's going on in Japan," Morris said. "This is the first time in 30 years that we've been out of stock."

Many customers are private individuals who help fuel sales of about a quarter million tablets a month. Most clients come from New York, Los Angeles — and Utah, Jones said. And while stockpiling antidotes for a nuclear emergency could seem extreme, Jones said the customers aren’t all the tin-foil hat set.

“I have some nuts, people who swear up and down that the world is going to end May 21,” he said. “Most of them are normal, every-day, see-them-at-the-grocery store people.”

Well, sure. It's true. Most nuts are normal, every-day, see-them-at-the-grocery store people.

And before you ask, none of the companies appear to be publicly traded. I looked. Recipharm AB does have an investor page.

I hope this doesn't make it hard for people in the affected area to get KI pills if and when they actually need them.

Comments

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

I hope this doesn't make it hard for people in the affected area to get KI pills if and when they actually need them.
This is exactly what I was thinking. It's really depressing to think that some panicked suburbanite in California who doesn't need the pills might prevent someone in Japan from getting them.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I hope the dipshits who are buying up the KI pills get some comfort from them. But maybe I'm just pissy because I can't take them myself....

[redbird]

Not that I was buying the Daily News even semi-regularly, but that's enough to mean I probably never will again: I do not need "Panic!" in large, unfriendly letters when I'm thousands of miles away from the problem. Nor would I if it was only thousands of meters.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It's true! I walked past the pharmacy's newspaper display and there it was, impossible to miss.

Not Helpful, I say.

[marginaleye.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of the idiots that demand unnecessary antibiotics from their doctors, and thus turn themselves into human incubators for resistant strains.

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

I take kelp pills as a regular thing (my diet is essentially void of iodine otherwise, and it makes my thyroid grumpy!), and just by coincidence I was about out and stopped in to get more this week. The clerk was all, "Yeah, these are very popular!" (the shelf was nearly bare -- we are in TEXAS!) but fortunately they do purchase-tracking and I was able to point out that it's a regular purchase for me and not a result of embarrassing stupidity.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

And also make themselves less able to fight influenza, while they're on those antibiotics, according to some recent research. You'd think they'd figure out that it causes more problems than it solves, but nooooo...

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Except it sounds like a lot of pills are going to Japan, as quoted:

"Online retailer nukepills.com said via its Twitter feed that it had sold out of KI pills on Tuesday.

It received 3,800 orders in 18 hours on Sunday and has shipped 50,000 pills to Tokyo, with the help of Harvard Medical School."

Unless they're talking about Tokyo, Texas, I'm not too worried.

Plus, it looks like more and more there aren't a lot of people who need them, period. My brother-in-law lives in Tokyo, and took his family to Kamakura on Monday (to be with more family, after unit 4 caught fire). They're not clamoring for pills, so...yeah. I doubt the need for pills in Japan will be a lot, although that doesn't mean that folks won't WANT them, too.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Well that's not fearmongering, not at all...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Oh for fsck's sake. I was hoping that was ironic. Cripes, New York???

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

although also in the news today: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/tsa-admits-bungling-of-airport-body-scanner-radiation-tests.ars

[cz_unit]

Well, the people in CA have finally gone batshit.

C

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. That's just relevant and timely reportage, that's what that is.

:/

[dirque.livejournal.com]

I was invested in CBLI, Cleveland Biolabs way before the quake as a book value growth play and this recent crisis has pushed it up 40%, but it's slowly falling now.

Other radsickness drug companies are OSIR, AOLS, and DSCI.

CBLI is donating all doses of their drugs. So I'm not sure what immediate profit they might get, but it may translate to FDA approval and inventory oeders in the years to come.