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.
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We are finally seeing action from the US government to address the molybdenum-99 shortage. Congressmen Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.), have introduced a bill to authorize $163 million over five years to create a domestic source of the medical imaging isotope. Unfortunately, the funding comes too late to ameliorate the current [...] The Ontario Ministry of Health has just issued a notice that the Chalk River nuclear reactor will be out of service until the end of 2009 at least. This reactor generated half of the world’s supply of Tc-99m, used in medical imaging studies. The problem is about to get worse as one of [...] I’m still tied up with the annual calibration on one of our accelerators, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, here are a few updates on the Molybdenum-99 shortage. A health crisis is currently underway, with barely any coverage in the American media. Over half of the world’s supply of molybdenum-99, an isotope used to generate radiopharmaceuticals for medical imaging procedures, is created in a single nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. The reactor shut down in November 2007 due to safety [...] I have been closely following the sad saga of Daniel Hauser, the Minnesota teen who ran away with his mother rather than continue treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Fortunately, he and his mother have returned to Minnesota, hopefully to continue his treatment. There has been a lot of debate about the ethics of a [...] Brilliant. Send this to all your friends. (H/T: The Amateur Scientist via Orac) Of all the types of cancer we treat with radiation, head and neck cancer has by far the worst side effects. Head and neck cancer comes in many different forms, but one thing those tumors have in common is that they are usually very close to radiation sensitive structures like the parotid glands (which [...] One issue that comes up in the discussion of nationalized health care is wait times. We’ve all heard horror stories about patients having to wait for seemingly insanely long periods of time before receiving the sort of basic medical care we take for granted in the United States. It’s hard to take anecdotal evidence seriously, [...] There are a lot of rumors and unsubstantiated reports flying around the internet about the swine flu outbreak in Mexico. A large information vacuum has been created by the lack of openness by the World Health Organization and the Mexican government. If you want a good source of information, the best place to [...] |
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