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Article: High Security Trips Up Some Irradiated Patients, Doctors Say
Thought this would be of interest.
-- John
John P. Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
3050 Traymore Lane
Bowie, MD 20715-2024
e-mail: jenday1@msn.com
-----Original Message-----
High Security Trips Up Some Irradiated Patients, Doctors Say
December 4, 2002
By AL BAKER
In one case last spring, a man being treated for an
overactive thyroid gland was stopped by the authorities on
two occasions while at a subway stop at Pennsylvania
Station. In another case about a month ago, a woman who had
undergone a diagnostic heart study was stopped while trying
to drive out of Manhattan through a tunnel.
In both cases, the people involved had been treated with
radioactive materials. And in both cases, doctors said,
they were stopped by law enforcement officers armed with
radiation detectors used to track possible terrorists.
Such reports are flowing into doctors' offices, physicians
in the metropolitan region and elsewhere say.
The expanded use of radiation and metal detectors to guard
against potential terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, has
prompted many unintended security stops, whether of cancer
patients undergoing radiation treatment or of travelers
with prosthetic limbs or pacemakers passing through airport
metal detectors. Drug dealers have been known to mark their
goods with radioactive material as a way of tracing it, and
one doctor said he had heard of shipments being stopped at
border crossings in Europe.
"This is all along the law of unintended consequences,"
Fred Mettler, the chairman of radiology and nuclear
medicine at the University of New Mexico, said yesterday.
"The question is, `How does the poor patient convince the
law enforcement authorities that they are truly patients
and not terrorists?' "
To better prepare their patients for security episodes
relating to their radioactive treatment, and to keep them
from being mistaken for those who would do harm, doctors in
New York are drawing up guidelines telling patients how
they should react. Doctors say Police Department officials
have recommended that patients carry letters from their
doctors to avoid confusion, but the police said that they
had issued no broad recommendations and that such letters
would not suffice to resolve the matter.
Countless patients being treated for a variety of ailments
may have had radioactive isotopes injected into their
bodies and can therefore set off alarms at borders, bridge
crossings or transportation hubs, or trigger the attention
of authorities who have portable radiation detectors.
The woman stopped recently near the tunnel contacted her
physician, Dr. Chaitanya Divgi, an expert in nuclear
medicine in the radiology department at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "She called me from the
cellphone," said Dr. Divgi, who could not identify the
tunnel but added that he spoke with the officer and that
the woman was later able to pass through. "Doctors are
talking about patients being stopped, about security alarms
going off after patients are being administered radio
pharmaceuticals."
Doctors say they have not criticized law enforcement
officers for their efforts, under which patients may be
questioned intensely and subjected to body searches.
Rather, most interviewed yesterday said the recent
incidents pointed out one of the sometimes odd byproducts
of the nation's heightened state of alert and gave them
confidence that the authorities' detection equipment was
working.
Dr. Christoph Buettner, an endocrinologist treating the man
with the overactive thyroid who was stopped at Penn
Station, said: "They did not treat him badly. They just
detected radioactivity and they had to pursue that, and
that is obviously the right thing to do in these
circumstances, in these times. We just want the cops to
have a way to identify patients who have been treated with
radioactive isotopes."
As part of the Police Department's new measures to guard
against potential terrorism, radiation detectors have been
installed outside several city buildings. Also, about 250
radiation detectors, worn on the belt, have been
distributed to officers. The devices are intended to form a
sort of moving detection curtain so that police officers
can interact with the public as they look for radioactive
material.
When the Police Department installed radiation detection
devices outside Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan in
June, a police inspector who had been injected with
radioactive dye for a stress test reportedly set them off.
The man with the overactive thyroid gland was stopped
after authorities somehow detected gamma rays emitting from
him and detained him for questioning, said Dr. Martin I.
Surks, the director of endocrinology at Montefiore Medical
Center who oversaw the man's treatment, which was
administered by Dr. Buettner. The doctors could not say
which law enforcement agency was involved.
A Police Department official said last night that the
department could find no records to confirm that incident.
Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority, said he had no record of it, either. Cliff
Black, an Amtrak spokesman, said yesterday that he was
still researching the matter.
According to his doctors, the patient, a 34-year-old
fitness instructor from the Bronx, was being treated for
Graves' disease, a thyroid condition, with radioactive
iodine (iodine-131). Sixty-three percent of it was
concentrated into his thyroid gland, in the front of his
windpipe in his lower neck, the doctors said.
"Three weeks after treatment, he returned to our clinic
complaining that he had been strip-searched twice at major
Manhattan subway stations," Dr. Surks and Dr. Buettner
wrote in a letter to be published today in The Journal of
the American Medical Association. "Police had identified
him as emitting radiation and had detained him for further
questioning."
The doctors said that the patient had requested that he not
be identified publicly and that they were unable to reach
him by phone yesterday. In their letter to the the journal
and in interviews yesterday, Dr. Surks and Dr. Buettner
said a police official had recommended that physicians who
treat patients with radioactive material give them letters
describing the isotope and dose, its biological half-life
and the date and time of treatment. The doctors also said
the police had recommended that patients be given a
telephone number where they can reach the physician 24
hours a day.
But a police official said last night that the department
had made no such broad recommendation. The official said
police officers would not treat a letter from a doctor as
sole proof that someone was above suspicion, but would
conduct an investigation first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/nyregion/04PATI.html?ex=1040008786&ei=1&en
=bef596269b32ea9c
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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