Health Threat of Medical Ionizing Radiation

Impact of Nuclear Medicine Exposures

In October 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) alerted all healthcare facilities involved in performing brain perfusion computed tomography (CT) to ensure their patients were not being overexposed to ionizing radiation (Samson, 2009). This notice was in response to the discovery that 206 patients subjected to this procedure at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles had been exposed up to eight times the recommended dose. The immediate effects to some patients were skin reddening and hair loss, but the long-term effects could be an increased risk of cancer. Since the error was in the programmed settings for the CT equipment, none of the medical personnel bothered to check the actual radiation doses the patients were receiving. The absence of exposure monitoring allowed the equipment to perform at this setting for over a year and a half....
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