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Chemotherapy Patients Set Off Subway Alarms
dave writes "Recently, cities such as New York and elsewhere have been installing radiation detectors in subways as an anti-terror precaution. However, as reported in New Scientist, patients who are undergoing radiation treatment are setting off the alarms. From the article, "a 34-year-old patient who had been treated with radioactive iodine for Graves disease, a thyroid disorder, returned to their clinic three weeks later complaining he had been strip-searched twice in Manhattan subway stations.""
My guess is that the detectors are set to "go off" even if the tiniest amount of radiation is found. That way, any attempt by terrorists to try to hide the radiation (thick lead, etc) will be thwarted.
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...got nailed twice. He was driving around the U.S. late at night, heading back into Canada, and a patrol unit pulled him over, threw everything out of the back of his trunk, then interrogated him for a little while. He drank some kind of radioactive fluid to treat his cancer after his surgery, and it had set off an alarm in the patrol car.
Same thing happened once he got to the border. The border guard let him go, then some guy came running out of the customs building screaming at the top of his lungs. They stopped him and he had to read them the same story all over again. This drug is so powerful he can only take it once every six months.
Normally thyroid cancer patients are told to stay some distance from family members when they return home. After a few days the levels are lower and such precautions aren't necessary.
I don't know if the levels are lower for Grave's disease, or if this person should not have been on crowded subways. But to detect the levels in a shielded device, you would probably want the sensors to be pretty sensitive. Sensitivity also helps to allow fewer detectors to be used.
Should a strip-search be necessary? I doubt it.
Just hold the detector close to the thyroid to verify the guy's story. Maybe hospitals could give out cards, and the security folks could phone the hospital for confirmation.
Or just call a cab for the poor guy.
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A friend of mine had a summer job at Triumpf a number of years ago. Triumf is a particle and nuclear physics lab. One day he took the morning off to get some medical tests done where they injected him full of tracer isotopes. We he tried to go back to work in the afternoon he set off half the radiation alarms in the place just by walking through the front door.
They gave him the rest of the day off.
I have been searched at the airport EVERY single time I have flown.
I was just searched for explosives, stopped in the next line, questioned as to why I had prescription blood pressure medicine, and why I had a car stereo in my bag.
I don't know if it is the beard or what, but I should not be picked for the random searches over 80% of the times I board a plane.
i wonder if the older glow in the dark watches or police with tritium on thier guns would set them off?
This doesn't surpise me at all. On National Public Radio today (All Things Considered) a researcher was talking about the best research tool for tracking down weapons of mass destruction: a 4" x 4" cotton swab. They run the swab over almost any surface and can detect radioactive material to the level of 1 part per billion. Geeez.
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A "dirty bomb" could be made out of alpha-active material. Alpha-radiation (He nuclei) will be stopped by a few pieces of paper. If the material is in a suitcase there is no radiation outside.
When the material is spread by an explosion, a fire or some other way, people will inhale it and it will stick in their lungs, giving them a huge dose of radiation.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
When I submitted this story:
2002-12-06 18:34:29 Radiation Treatment Patients Set Off Subway Alarms (articles,tech) (accepted)
The editors changed it, to Chemotherapy... which is obviously not the same... Oh well.
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
Its a good thing I don't live in NYC, being a physicist I've gained a helathy glow over the years.
I might not actually glow as my friends claim, but after noticing some variations in background radiations once, I took some measurements. I found out that my right hand is more radioactive than the left and hence changed the background radiation depending on which hand I held the detector in. Could someone from NYC tell me where the detectors are, so if I ever use the subways I know which side to walk on?
You know what? I get searched too, and I'm a white guy.
I feel your pain. Personally, I honestly don't care about the searching too much, as long as the security screeners are POLITE and PROFESSIONAL. If they are not, I call bullsh*t. I actually had a security guard accuse me of being some kind of militia/survivalist type (must have been my boots)... he proceeded to search everything... I don't know what his problem was. Whatever it was, even if he got off on it, at least he was polite.
What burns me is when the security guy (with a smile) picks the young, buxom, well-endowed mom with the newborn baby out of the crowd and slowly, ever so sloooowly, wands her down. I'm all for getting your jollies... but for god's sake... get your jollies on your own time! While you're working for US, you'd better protect US. Instead, you have a guy taking advantage of his position so he can "pitch a tent" by wanding down all the voluptuous women.
Airline security at its finest.
You are more right than you know.
Even though some of the chemotheraputic agents we use these days are related to chemical warfare agents, it's the dose that makes or breaks you.
Virtually all chemo agents have one thing in common... they are some kind of metabolic poison. They are nucleoside analogues, directly denature DNA or proteins... whatever. Because of this, they are quite useful in cancer treatments, primarily because cancer cells divide at an abnormally fast rate, and are very metabolically active... ergo, these drugs will affect such cells to a great extent than normal tissues. Keep in mind, however, that some of your normal tissues are also rapidly dividing: bone marrow, hair follicles, intestinal lining. Ever wonder why cancer patients lose their hair and need blood transfusions? That's why, in a nutshell.
Don't let anyone tell you that chemo is bad/evil... that's bullshit. Unpleasant? Yes. Evil/bad/drug-company-conspiracy? No. Because of chemo, we have very high cure rates on some kinds of cancer... testicular cancer is a good example; very treatable with chemotherapy. But, like anything else, it doesn't work on every cancer, or every person... that's the other edge of the biological diversity sword.
Also, there are some chemo drugs that have a lifetime maximum dose... you get amount X and NO MORE... ever.
The dose really does make the poison, and that's not theory... that's real world.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I don't have any chemical warfare experience, but a few years ago I did undergo two separate procedures that are known as a "radioactive synovectomy" for my right knee. I've posted the details on a forum for people like me with Psoriatic Arthritis at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PsoriaticArthritis/m essage/23440 but basically the doctor injects a small amount of a radioactive isotope of phosphorus (P32) into the synovial cavity of my knee to destroy the diseased synovial tissue lining the joint. The injection is much, much easier than a surgical synovectomy which can take weeks to recover from I've heard, and is much more expensive as well.
;-), and if I held it near my knee it pinned the needle on the most sensitive scale. I was emitting about 2 milli-Rems per hour of radiation, which decreased rapidly the further away the meter was (inverse square law). I panicked and called the doctor on his cell phone. He assured me he had injected the correct amount, etc., and acted as though he thought I must be crazy or something, so on my next visit to his office I brought my Geiger counter along to prove to him that the radiation was indeed detectable externally. He was still incredulous, and thought I must have a defective meter or something. During my next procedure (which had to be done in the radiology lab of the hospital), as soon as the P32 was injected I asked one of the lab technicians to verify my readings, which he did. My Geiger counter had been right on the money, and even after being assured of the accuracy of the readings, my doctor STILL looked skeptical!
My rheumatologist had told me that the beta radiation wouldn't penetrate the tissue of my knee and that none would be detectable externally, but just to double check I pulled out my Geiger counter after I got home (*everyone* has their own Geiger counter, right?
P32 has a half-life of about two weeks, so after 6 to 8 weeks it's virtually undetectable.
-- Ron
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Yeah, yeah. Just because it's AC doesn't mean it's a troll. In fact, I wasn't trolling.
The other day, I was talking to my Barber whose friend is Arabic. He gets searched at every airport he goes to, and he finds it offensive. He's born and bred USian, but because of the way he looks he gets treated like a second class citizen. 18 months ago, he didn't have that problem. And it seems to be getting worse for people.
Maybe my point about US activities overseas was off-topic, and wasn't what people wanted to hear - fine, but the Post was modded +1 Insightful for a while - but I still believe that if US citizens don't fight the constant erosion of your rights you will end up in a Police State that claims to be a Democracy (or rather, a Republic. Sounds familiar? P.R.C. anyone?).
So why do I care, when I'm obviously not a US citizen? Because like it or not the US affects the rest of us, and the better your country is the better for the rest of us.
"Soon as the news hits that the New York subway system is contaminated with radioactive material, there will be panic, regardless of amount."
Now, maybe they've changed things, but the last time I was in New York, the Subways were open. IE: you could freely pour particulate matter into air vents and other areas that honeycomb the streets under Manhattan. It's nice in winter to get the warm breeze of a passing Subway train, but it also means it's very easy to contaminate. There's no reason a terrorist would go through the gateway, when there are so many other entry methods they can use.
Reactionist, rather than rational, security measures are not secure.
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This is an example of an error in numerical reasoning called the base rate fallacy.
.999). If we test 1000 people, 5% of the 999 (about 50 people) will be false positives.
The base rate fallacy is trying to interpret the results of a test without considering how common the thing being tested for is in the population being sampled.
For example, suppose there is a medical test for a disease that has a five percent false positive rate. I then grab somebody off the street and administer the test, and he turns out positive. How certain are we that he has the disease? 95%? No, we cannot say without knowing the probability that any individual pulled off the street has the disease.
Suppose one person in a thosuand has the disease. There are two ways we can get positive results from the test. On the one hand he may actually have the disease (p = 0.001). If we sample 1000 people, one person will test positive for this reason. On the other hand he may not have the disease (p =
So, of the 51 positives we'd expect to get, only one person legitimately has the disease. Instead of there being a 95% probability of the disease, there is actually only a 2% probability that a positive test indicates anything at all when applied to a random population. In order to apply the test usefully, I need some independen reason to suspect the person has the disease.
Even a slight reason for suspicion can alter the interpretation dramatically. For example, suppose I'm about 10% certain a person has the disease. If I tested 1000 people who met this criteria, 100 would test positive because they had the disease, 50. So if I'm 10% certain, then a positive test should make me 66% certain. If I'm 50% certain. then a positive test should make me about 90% certain.
A lot of public security measures suffer from the base rate problem. For example random drug testing doesn't tell you with much certainty that a person is doing drugs -- you really ought to test only peple you have independent reason to believe are using drugs. The only time widespread screening makes sense is if the base rate of the thing being tested is very high relative to the false positive probability.
This cancer patient situation is essentially similar. If we have reason to suspect that somebody is a terrorist, if he sets of radioactivity alarms it is very suspicious. If we have no such reason, then whether or not it is suspicious depends on the base rate of nuclear terrorism in the community.
Now it so happens that the false positive rate for this test is rather small: very few people are walking around radioactive for innocent reasons. ON the other hand, the rate of atomic terrorism in the general population is even smaller by several orders of magnitude.
This means that this particular alarm essentially tells us nothing about the people who set it off. It is probably not significantly better than a policy of randomly strip searching people.
However, this is not the only way to look at the problem. Suppose we knew for a fact that there was going to be a suicide dirty bomber somewhere in the city. Screening people in the subway might effectively prevent it from happening in the subway, either by deterring the bomber, or by catching hime, at the price of also catching hundreds of innocent people.
I think the take home message of this is that we should not use such systems on a routine basis; in cases where we have good reason to do so, we should remember that while if there is a terrorist he'll be culled out by the system, any particular individual culled by the system is not significantly more likely to be guilty than any randomly selected person.
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We should provide radiotherapy patients with a hospital-issued ID so they do not have to suffer through security checks. It would not be much more difficult than issuing a driver's license.
It's funny that you should bring this up. I was just at the state legislature on Wednesday watching the discussion on the concealed weapon system, and I gave testimony saying that the permit should not be a photogrph based permit, and should instead be non-photo based, because it would be very likely that the photo based permit would be counterfeited for reasons other than carrying a concealed weapon, and would add a new front in ID theft.
Though this isn't so much the same reason, making up new reasons for photo ID's is a very bad idea...I've always said myself that photograph based drivers' licenses haven't solved the problems that they themselves caused when they appeared on the scene. More photo ID's cards are not a solution to anything except how to create spiffier forms of identity fraud.
Issuing driver's licenses are incidentally a pain in the ass, especially in New York, which no longer accepts a birth certificate as proof of identity (see the NY DMV website for more info. It's kinna interesting.) Funny, New York never made the photograph mandatory on their licenses--no point, since many of the states residents will never have had licenses in the first place, so the photo ID advantages were lost. (The NY DMV commmissioner has had, since 1994, the ability to issue licenses with photos at his discretion, but is not required to.)
And naturally, I am extremely bothered by the idea that someone has to be given a photo ID card because something about them is different. That's the whole situation here...type A citizens don't need photo ID card, type B citizens who radiate gamma level radiation, for reasons that aren't entirely our business, need photo ID card explaining that. That can't be good precedence.
While I hate making the comparison, the Nazi's did have a fucking photo ID card for just about everything...I think they had some sorta odd philosophy that the more photo ID cards a person had, the more difficult they were to fake an identity. Fortunately, underground counterfeiters sent many people to freedom by faking all those documents that the Nazi's made. Frankly, all it achieved was a lot of inconvenience for everyone.