RE: I-131 Therapy & Contamination

[Gerald Feldman <gfeldman@uci.edu>]

Patrick:

We've tried washing down our sinks with cold iodine solution (both KI and
Betadine), and were not too impressed (we have porcelain sinks however, and
they are quite porous).

Instead, we line our sinks with 4 or 6 mil vinyl (visquane).  We cut a hole
at the bottom a little larger than the drain, securely tape the plastic to
the bottom of the sink and the drain, and punch small holes in the tape
(lining up with the holes in the metal strainer covering the drain).  With
this method, we usually see contamination only on the metal stainer for the
drain and in the drain itself.

Hope this helps,

Gerald Feldman
RSO
University of California, Irvine Medical Center
Orange, CA
gfeldman@uci.edu

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At 10:51 AM 7/23/98 -0500, you wrote:

... >I've also been toying with the idea of washing down some of the metal
>sink fixtures with and iodine solution prior to therapies.  It seems
>that certain areas of the sink get contaminated so bad that we have
>actually filed off some metal to get the contamination.  This is an
>experiment I have yet to try.
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Patrick S. Muldoon, CHP
>VA Medical Center, San Francisco
>