RE: radiographer "overexposure"

["Walter Cofer" <cofer@NETTALLY.COM>]

While I found the film badge discussion related to the 3/5/03 radiography

incident in Washington state to be interesting, I suspect that members of

this list (and perhaps the Washington regulators who issued the report) may

be unaware that when radiographers refer to "film badges" they do not really

mean film badges - they use the term to refer to any type of whole body

personnel monitoring badge.  This is because they used film badges for so

long that the term "film badge" has become synomynous for any PM badge.

While there may be some holdouts here and there, the vast majority of

radiography companies have switched to TLDs and OSLDs.  Just as radiation

control regulations have been slow to incorporate references to OSLDs, the

radiography industry has been slow to change their terminology.  Most

radiography procedures still reference FBs even though they stopped using

them years ago.



A similar situation is where I and many other "old school" radiographer

types still refer to AEA Technology QSA - one of the major radiography

camera manufacturers - as Amersham, because we used Amersham Corp.

radiography cameras - AEA's predecessor.  (Actually, I can date myself even

farther back, because we referred to our cameras as TechOps cameras during

my radiography days - TechOps was Amersham's predecessor, and Amersham

retained the TechOps name until they replaced it with their Sentinel brand.)



A better analogy (because it also generates confusion) is when industrial

radiographers refer to "x-raying" a weld or some other object, which many

interpret as use of an industrial x-ray machine, when they really mean that

they used a radioisotope to produce their radiographs.  Just as

radiographers say "film badge" when they mean any PM badge, they say "x-ray"

when they mean any method of performing industrial radiography.  More than a

few regulators have been tripped up on this one.



I know that this information doesn't address the technical issues raised by

the report and discussed by list members, but I thought it was worth sharing

with everyone.





Walter Cofer

(former gamma cowboy & boiler rat)

Florida Bureau of Radiation Control













************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/