Abstract
An assessment of Committed Effective Dose (CED) due to consumption of Red Sea fish containing
210Po and
137Cs was performed for 23 different marine fish samples collected from the local market at Port Sudan. The fish were classified according to their feeding habits into three categories: carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores. Measured activity concentrations of
210Po were found in the ranges 0.25–6.42 (carnivores), 0.7–5 (omnivores) and 1.5–3.8 (herbivores) Bq/kg fresh weight. In the same study, activity concentrations of Cs-137 were determined to be in the ranges 0.1–0.46 (carnivores), 0.09–0.35 (omnivores) and 0.09–0.32 (herbivores) Bq/kg fresh weight, which were several times lower than those of
210Po. Appropriate conversion factors were used to derive the CED, which was found to be 0.012, 0.01 and 0.01 (µSv/yr) in carnivores, omnivores and herbivores, respectively, for
137Cs. This contributes about 0.4% of the total dose exclusively by ingestion of fish. For
210Po, it was found to be 3.47, 4.81 and 4.14 (µSv/yr) in carnivores, omnivores and herbivores, respectively, which represents 99.6% of the total dose (exclusively by ingestion of fish). The results of CED calculations suggest that the dose received by the Sudanese population from the consumption of marine fish is rather small and that the contribution of
137Cs is negligible compared to
210Po.