I am going to make your children safer today.

In the event of an accident or a terror attack at a nuclear plant - say at Indian Point, 35 miles up the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan - this column just may save their lives.

Over the next few hundred words, I will convince you to stock the family medicine chest with something called potassium iodide. You will want to make sure the drug is readily available at school and day care too.

Think of potassium iodide as the little white tablet that, if we're all very lucky in this terror-prone era, no one will ever have to take. But I promise, this is one medication you'll want to have handy should the need arise.

I don't own stock in the company, a tiny operation run by two ex-New Yorkers. I met them just last week. But after three days of speaking with experts, asking tough questions and reading background reports, I am now convinced: In a big radiation leak, whether by accident or terrorism, this drug is still the best protection available against thyroid cancer, a key risk in a nuclear disaster, especially for kids.

But don't believe me. Believe Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund and president of the Children's Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center. Redlener, who just may be America's leading advocate on child-health issues, is as gung-ho on potassium iodide as I am.

"We must be serious as we approach this new world of ours," Redlener was saying at week's end. "Potassium iodide is one of the few things we can do that will, without question, save lives if there is some kind of nuclear catastrophe."

Low-cost, easy to take, potentially hugely beneficial.

"It should be in the medicine chest, right next to the ipecac," the poison-response medicine, Redlener said. "And not just in the area directly around a nuclear plant. We should think about a radius of 100 to 200 miles."

More of Redlener later. Some science, some history and some nuclear politics first.

Potassium iodide works by saturating the thyroid with stable iodine. Then when the radioactive stuff tries to seep in, the saturated thyroid will not absorb it.

Sounds simple enough.

But for a quarter century now, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been giving the cold shoulder to potassium iodide.

The World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the American Thyroid Association - they've all been calling potassium iodide a potential lifesaver in a nuclear accident.

But the NRC has had a ready answer for that: The chance of a accident at a nuclear plant was so remote, the federal regulators said, there wasn't any need for the pills. They'd only scare people. And if an accident did occur, a massive evacuation would be enough.

The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island did rattle some officials at the NRC, focusing attention on the drug. But only briefly. An emergency shipment was rushed by Air Force jet into Harrisburg, Pa. Local officials quickly realized, however, that the supply was nowhere near enough for everyone in harm's way. The pills were locked in a warehouse and never distributed.

The Chernobyl accident in 1986, the worst so far, raised the question of potassium iodide again. According to the United Nations International Thyroid Project, that accident had led to 11,000 cases of children's thyroid cancer by the year 2000, with thousands more expected in the next few years.

Interestingly, 97 percent of those cases occurred more than 30 miles from the plant, some as far as 200 miles away. Why not in the immediate vicinity? The Soviets distributed potassium iodide to the people in 19 close-in villages. The drug seemed to work.

It took Sept. 11 to really focus U.S. attention on the threat of a massive radiation leak at a nuclear plant. Now it wasn't just accidents the neighbors could worry about. There was also the genuine threat of a terror attack.

Before the end of last year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered 6 million potassium-iodide tablets and offered stockpiles to the 35 states with nuclear-power plants. New York State has requested 1.2 million pills, 500,000 of which are going to Westchester County, home of Indian Point.

The Centers for Disease Control purchased another 1.7 million tablets. A supply of potassium iodide was shipped to Utah for the Winter Olympics. The bulk, per-tablet rate? 17.8 cents.

These sales were progress, obviously. But the process raised as many questions as it answered.

Who will get these pills?

Who might need them?

And how should they be kept: in government warehouses, or distributed house by house?

No one is closer to the center of the swirling debate over potassium iodide than Alan Morris.

He and partner Bruce Rodin are the founders of AnbexInc., a tiny drug company that is the federal government's sole supplier of potassium iodide and the only company with FDA approval to sell the drug to the public, under the brand name IOSAT. They have been focused on this drug since shortly after Three Mile Island. They've been trying to get it accepted - and widely sold - ever since.

"That 7.7 million tablets the government has already ordered, it's a start," said Morris, the company president and by far the more gregarious of the two. "But given the need out there, it is absurdly low."

Morris and Rodin sat in a midtown restaurant the other day and spoke about the raucous debate they're now in the middle of.

"The pro-nuclear people hate us," said Morris. "They say, 'If we allow this to become widely known and used, people will say, ah-ha, nuclear power is dangerous. You see? You have this medicine.' They think it will erode public confidence in nuclear power."

Anti-nuclear people?

"They hate it even more," Morris said. "IOSAT cuts the legs out of their basic argument. Their argument is that nuclear power is so dangerous, there's nothing you can do to protect yourself - other than shut down the plants at once. Well, we're talking about a medicine that will protect people from the danger of the plant. They don't want to hear that at all."

But 9/11 has opened some eyes.

"Even if you believe a nuclear accident is impossible," Morris said, "no one can say these plants are protected against terror attacks, not when you find plans for nuclear plants in caves in Afghanistan. The U.S. is the only major nuclear power in the world with a major stockpile of this drug."

And increasingly local citizens are demanding it.

That's happened in Westchester. The rumbles are spreading from there. Twenty-two million people live within 50 miles of Indian Point. How far will those 500,000 tablets go, when the FDA recommends one tablet a day for 14 days?

"Where are we going to move 22 million people and keep them for three weeks and not shut this country down?" Morris asked. "For 17.8 cents a tablet, we can avoid that."

And what about those people who live 50, 100, 150 miles away? That includes a big patch of the Northeast.

And what about the other 103 nuclear plants in the United States?

Morris has a way of answering that. "The second-worst thing is not to have potassium iodide," he said. "The worst thing is not to have enough. If it's not enough, the half that doesn't have it will go crazy. Why not me? Am I the wrong color or the wrong ethnicity or the wrong sexual preference? They only gave it to the white people in Westchester. They didn't give any to us working-class people in Brooklyn and Queens. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna let our kids get cancer?"

Ugly stuff.

Irwin Redlener, for one, is already thinking about all this.

"If you look at a map of the nuclear plants and draw 200-mile circles around them, it basically covers the whole East Coast," he said. "We would recommend that every single family stock potassium iodide tablets. It is not good enough to be in a central repository. If you don't take them very shortly after exposure - within a couple of hours - they lose their efficacy. If it's more than six hours, it does nothing. Don't bother."

Obviously, some public education is needed between here and there.

"There has to be a protocol that everyone understands and everyone signs onto," Redlener said. "It makes no sense not to do. This is one thing that will actually do some good."

IOSAT is available at drug stores or on the web at anbex.com.

©2002 Newsday