A potassium iodide, or KI, kit is displayed at the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit on April 26, 2018. Photo by Mark Brown/Blackburn News.A potassium iodide, or KI, kit is displayed at the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit on April 26, 2018. Photo by Mark Brown/Blackburn News.
Windsor

Radioactive prevention pills to start across Windsor-Essex & Chatham-Kent

The Windsor-Essex County Health Unit (WECHU) is getting ready to expand its Potassium Iodide (KI) pill distribution program.

The pills are salt tablets given out in case of a nuclear disaster to prevent the body from absorbing potentially radioactive iodine.

More details will be provided at a news conference Monday morning, but the health unit said phase two of the program is set to start in the secondary zone, which includes residents within 80 kilometres from the Fermi II nuclear plant, just across from Amherstburg, and the Davis-Besse nuclear plant just east of Toledo, Ohio.

Primary zone residents living within a 16-kilometre radius of those plants were given the pills last summer, but that only included residents in Amherst Point and Boblo Island.

The secondary zone includes the rest of Windsor-Essex and western Chatham-Kent.

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