Alas, it is true. This blog has gone the way of so many others before it. What happened is that a project that was on the back burner got started again right after I started posting here. This is a good thing; I’m really excited about this new project.
Continue reading What? Another dead blog?
|
|||||
|
Last year there was a horrible radiation overdose in California, where a CT technologist gave a 23 month old child 151 scans in just over an hour. A hearing to revoke the tech’s license is just underway and the testimony so far gives little indication exactly how it happened. Earlier I wrote that the American Medical Isotopes Production Act was still stuck in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. A hopeful sign that progress is about to be made is a hearing on the bill by the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment that took place on Sept. 9. Common household objects killing you with radiation is becoming quite a theme on this blog. We’ve had radioactive recliners and radioactive drywall. It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before we reached the silent killer: granite countertops. The answer is no; at least not from radiation. The Sarasota Herald Tribune is reporting that testing by three agencies, the Florida Department of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, on drywall manufactured in China has found no traces of radioactivity. Why was it being tested in the first place? Apparently, there have been quite a few problems with Chinese drywall: foul smells, metal corrosion and even illnesses reported in people living in houses with it. A radioactive material called phosphogypsum was considered as a possible contaminant in the drywall, but the testing ruled this out. ScienceNews has an update on the Molybdenum-99 diagnostic imaging isotope shortage. With the shutdown of the Chalk River and Petten nuclear reactors, Mo-99 production has fallen to 30 percent of normal. The article reports three strategies hospitals are employing to deal with the shortage. Some are putting patients on wait lists. Others are working longer hours, trying to test as many patients as possible before their supply decays (Mo-99 has only a 66 hour half life, and Technetium-99m, its daughter product actually used in the exams has a 6 hour half life.) The third strategy is use substitute isotopes whenever possible. The article mentions several alternatives, such as thallium-201 for heart imaging studies. However, these alternatives can be more expensive and, as is the case with thallium-201, give the patient a higher dose of radiation. In addition, even if the alternatives cost the same, apparently Medicare is refusing to cover them. The Center for Medicare Services is considering changing its position, but no decision is expected for at least 6 months. Meanwhile the American Medical Isotopes Production Act languishes in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Even if it passes, it will be several years before a domestic source of Mo-99 is viable. When the Petten reactor comes back up in a few weeks, it will only be in service for 6 months before it shuts down for maintenance for an additional 6 months. It’s looking more and more like this shortage is going to be more than a temporary inconvenience. (Via the tireless John Jacobus. You can assume that for any post of mine, there is at least a 75% chance he was the one who brought it to my attention.) Yesterday was National Dosimetrist’s Day, and I would be remiss if I did not thank all of the dosimetrists out there that do such a great job. The dosimetrist is often the hub of a radiation therapy department, interacting with physicians, physicists and therapists on a daily basis. They will follow a patient throughout their treatment process from the initial imaging, the planning and their eventual treatment, making sure everything goes according to the physician’s intent. For some reason, every dosimetrist likes to work with all of the lights turned off. So, if you didn’t take the opportunity yesterday, make sure to drag your dosimetrist out of their dark, dank dungeon and into the light and congratulate them on a job well done. Just because there hasn’t been a One Star Mondays post in a while, that doesn’t mean I have run out of bad music to share. We have only just begun (hey, that may be a song to use in the future) to scratch the surface of the bad music that has accumulated over the centuries. This week’s installment won a Grammy in 2007 for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. I can only imagine that the award category was so specific that this song was the only one nominated. In any event, you can find the Grammy award winning Black Eyed Peas with their Grammy award winning song, “My Humps”, here at YouTube (embedding disabled to protect the innocent). The last article in this series examined the distribution of dose inside a patient when they are treated with a single therapy beam. The question is, how do we use this knowledge to treat a patient in the most effective manner? We want the patient’s tumor to receive the dose that the physician prescribes, but we do not want the dose to surrounding tissue to be too high. One way to achieve both of these goals is through arranging the angles of the beams entering the patient. My knowledge of the Scottish legal system is fairly limited (ok, non-existant), but it looks like the sad case of Lisa Norris, a 16 year old girl who died in 2006 after receiving a radiation dose 58% greater than prescribed, is under investigation yet again. A fatal accident inquiry has just been launched looking into the circumstances of her death. An earlier investigation by the government of Scotland found that a staff member at the Beatson Oncology Center in Glasgow was under-trained and under-qualified, and that the staff member made a critical error on a form that led to the wrong dose being delivered. However, an autopsy determined that Lisa died from complications of her pineal cancer and not from the overdose. |
|||||
|
|
|||||
