Dear Dr. Zoomie, I’m a nurse in the Emergency Department so I was concerned when I read a story about some hospital staff who started feeling ill after seeing a patient and thinking the patient was radioactive and must have affected their health. In this case it turned out there wasn’t any radioactivity – but what if there had been? Is this something I need to worry about?
Thanks for including the link – I hadn’t heard of this one and am glad I had a chance to take a look. And, much as I’d like to be able to say it surprises me that trained medical folks would make this mistake, it really doesn’t, mostly because doctors, nurses, and technicians are usually not given much (if any) information about radiation and its health effects. I’ve worked at a couple of hospitals, trained a lot of medical folks on responding to radiological emergencies here in the US, and even trained a few thousand medical caregivers in Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident. And far too few of them had ever received any solid information about how the radiation would affect their patients or themselves. So let’s take a look at this story and then at some of the relevant radiation science.
As near as I can tell, an as-yet unidentified person started feeling ill “after they may have come into contact with a radiological agent.” The hospital alerted local emergency responders, who shut down the facility and its parking lot. However, although the patient felt ill, I’ve not found anything about medical workers saying they felt ill – calling the emergency responders seemed to be a precautionary measure they took rather than a response to their own personal concerns. Anyhow – back to the story!
To start, the patient didn’t claim to have been a radiation therapy or nuclear medicine patient – both of these would have involved exposing the patient to radiation (radiation oncology) or giving them radioactivity to take internally (nuclear medicine). Had they received nuclear medicine then the patient would have been radioactive; simply exposing them to radiation, however, would not have caused them to become radioactive themselves. And for what it’s worth, I’ve had both of these and neither made me feel physically ill.
With both of these, though, it actually might be possible for the patient to experience some symptoms. Exposure to high doses of radiation, for example, can cause people to feel ill a few hours later, then they feel better for a few weeks or longer before coming down with radiation sickness. So if the patient had been exposed to a high dose of radiation then they might have felt ill (although it’s not common), but they would not have been giving off radiation and could not have put anybody at risk.
Alternately, if they were a nuclear medicine patient, if they were given the radiopharmaceutical orally then they might have felt ill very briefly as the meds reached the stomach (this happened to a few of our patients at one hospital I worked at). And, in the case of radiopharmaceuticals, the patient does become radioactive for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. Having said that, though, we had to make sure the doses we gave the patients would not put the patients’ family members, neighbors, friends, or even passersby at risk. When a patient is allowed to leave the hospital, they’re safe to be around.
The bottom line is that simply being exposed to radiation (which is what the patient suspected, although the story doesn’t explain why that might have happened) would not have made the patient radioactive, although if it was a very high dose (100 rem or more) then the patient might have felt mildly ill within several hours after exposure. But let me add that if the Emergency Room patient had received 100 rem from whoever they came in contact with, that person would have likely received enough radiation to have been fatal within a few to several hours (and don’t worry – I don’t think that scenario is at all likely).
In this case, things ended well when firefighters failed to find any radiation in the hospital. Yay!
Oh – I should mention, too, that the training I gave in Japan was to help medical and emergency responders understand how to safely care for patients who might contaminated with radioactivity from the damaged reactors at Fukushima. In their case, contamination was a very real possibility – but not enough to pose a health risk. I made sure to point out that routine precautions (gloves, face mask, etc.) protected the medical staff caring for the assassinated Russian spy, Alexander Litvenenko following his poisoning with radioactive Po-210 in 2006, and they didn’t even know he was radioactive; I also mentioned that this boded well for medical staff who were alert to the potential for contamination.
Anyhow – that’s all that comes to mind offhand. Thanks for the question, and I hope this information is helpful to you.