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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.""
Chemotherapy is not radiation therapy!
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.
Of particular note is that the NYT was *not* able to verify that anyone said they carrying a note from a doctor would be useful; rather, it said the police would not accept such a letter as "sole proof" that the person was not trying to pull a fast one on them, and would still conduct a full investigation.
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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/me set the BS flag up.
Radioactive stuff is mostly used to follow something you ingest, or an injection.
I really can't see the use of a powerful, radioactive drug taken every 6 months.
Though I might be wrong, I have serious doubt.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
I know that some radioactive iodine isotopes are used for thyroid treatment as a marker or for destruction of cancerous thyroid tissue. Thyroid tissue absorbs iodine and certain iodine isotopes.
That guy must have a hell of a time getting to work.
Maybe there's another reason he got strip searched.
And he was strip searched IN THE SUBWAY STATION? Dude, I hate to break the news, but those weren't cops that were doing the strip searching.
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.
What about this guy?
9 07 52.html
http://wcbs880.com/water/watercooler_story_2980
I never thought cat shit could be more offensive, but add radiation and we take it to a whole new level.
From the Article "Oct 25, 2002 9:04 am US/Eastern
(AP) (WHITMAN, Mass. ) A man who ignored a veterinarian's order to flush his cat's radioactive waste down the toilet was hit with a $2,800 bill.
And Bill Jenness said he's happy to pay it.
"I don't feel I was mistreated," Jenness told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy. "It's my cat, my responsibility and I did not abide by the directions I was given."
Jenness' cat, Mitzi, an 11-year-old shorthair, was treated with an injection of radioiodine after developing hyperthyroidism, which is common in cats her age.
The treatment makes the cat radioactive for weeks, so special care is required, including limiting snuggling time, keeping the cat away from children and pregnant women and using protective gloves when flushing the cat litter.
Jenness said he decided to throw the litter in the trash after the waste hardened into abnormally large clumps.
"I was afraid of my septic system being clogged," he said.
Mitzi's mess was discovered at an incinerator in Rochester when alarms detected radioactivity. Workers traced the waste to Jenness after finding mail with his name on it nearby.
The radiation treatment by Radiocat in Waltham and cost of disposing the waste totaled about $5,000. Jenness said it was worth it because Mitzi is doing well.
Radiocat's Web site says the amount of radiation from a radioiodine shot is probably less than the amount a person receives on a long plane flight or a day at the beach.
But Thomas Burnett, a Whitman public works commissioner, said any radiation in trash is too much.
This is too funny.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
This is just more fallout (no pun intended) from the Bush/Ashcroft "War On Terrorism", which is really just a thinly veiled way to erode people's Constitutional rights. Do you think that strip searching a cancer patient is a reasonable search as defined by The Constitution? Do you think that radiation detectors that force cancer patients to reveal their illness and treatment to complete strangers is a reasonable form of search?
People need to open their eyes and see what kind of police state the Bush administration is creating -- before it's too late.
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
Well posting as an AC and trolling as well. Ho hum.
1. Cops do whip black ass, and white ass, hispanic ass, all kindsa ass. Course next to Latin America and Russia, I would prefer a US ass whuppin than one of those. Have seen South American and Russian cops tear it up. And people don't sue there.
Hey you know what? I am a Jewish Hispanic. And I look like I should be selling rugs in a bazaar. I look more Arabic than most Arabs. I get searched in airports. Big deal, 5 minutes extra. Makes me feel kinda safe. I have been searched five times this year and the people in the airport were nothing but nice and apologetic to me.
We had a load of hurt come down on our country and we are watching our backs. Nothing wrong with that, and I am happy we are doing it. And you can use the arguement that the methods they are using are not effective. Well please suggest something. Should we do nothing?
I hold citizen ship in the UK,US, and Colombia. Pretty varied huh? Guess I am lucky, gotta pretty good world view IMHO.
The US does some harsh shit sometimes, but we do a lotta good stuff too. Stop trolling, stop being an AC.
I gotta tell you somehing as well. These days more BLACK people have asked me if I was an arab. Trying be a computer geek who is in radioshack buying wire when a big black man says"lookit at ol bin lades kid getting his shit for a bomb, damn, you aint gonna blow me up, just where in the hell or you from"
Man, got me all pissed on a friday night.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
"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."
If anything, all those false positives will make it easier to sneak in a nuclear or radiological device. When the alarms are going off every day you tend not to be as attentive as you would be otherwise, and the personnel involved won't exactly give a thorough search.
How did 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 happen? Too much information gathering, not enough information interpretation. And from the looks of this, we're setting ourselves up for more of the same.
Leave the poor canadians alone! Just because they aren't important enough and there aren't enough perks to purchase to make them worth owning is no reason to rub it in or make fun of them!
I think it was the NYT that reported recently a guy who was entering the White House after a medical procedure and heart a faint electronic noise go off. He was instantly surrounded by the Secret Service which, given their limited sense of humor, is a pretty frightening thing. (I am proud that years ago I got one of them to smile. :)
I don't think he was strip-searched (he didn't work there but was a VIP of some sort).
It apparantly is no longer enough for them to MISS typos in their own writings, they have to introduce them into other peoples'!
"And like that
Tiny amounts of radiation in catshit in a landfill is too much, even though its probably full of smoke so detectors. So.... FLUSH it, so it ends up in the septic tank, runs out through the leach bed into the ditch, down to the creek and into Lake Ontario.
Fucking brilliant.
This space available.
There's a report on it in the New England Journal of Medicine (1998). It's not a capsule of plutonium or anything, it's a radioactive iodine. I didn't believe it myself until I saw the kind of treatment he was undergoing.
IANARO (Radiation Oncologist), but have some knowledge of this subject.
Usually Iodine-131 is given as ablation therapy for hyperthyroidism... the thyroid gland takes up the radioactive iodine (just like it takes up regular iodine) and literally burns itself out. The damage is localized because I-131 is a beta emitter. You can get the gland surgically removed as an alternative, but most people go for the pill... it's just easier. There may be specific indications for surgical removal (discrete mass, need pathology input, etc), but I could not name them.
There are other radioactive treatments for cancers... radioactive "seed" implants in prostate cancer for instance. I have never seen anyone walking around in public with them, but scanning someone being treated in that fashion might be interesting (to say the least). If airline security goons are making new mothers drink their own breastmilk (yes, I said "goons," there's no other name for someone who would do something that stupid) I can see some overzealous security folks doing a body cavity search to find the source of that "rectal radiation." I shudder at the thought of the lawsuit amount after something like that.
People undergoing chemotherapy will not set off any radiation alarms. However, from a theoretical standpoint, I can see the possibility of them setting off chemical warfare agent detectors. Please note the detectors would have to be outrageously sensitive (I don't know if it's even possible to make them that sensitive)... almost all of the chemotheraputic agents in common use are metabolic poisons of one type or another, including drugs like the nitrogen mustards (related to mustard gas). I could see someone getting some chemo solution spilled on their sleeve, and setting of somebody's chemical warfare sniffer. Someone with a little more chemical warfare experience want to comment?
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
As I recall, nuclear power plants have often gone on alert for false positives resulting from radon exposure in the home.
While the odds are slim, considering the entire length Adirondack and Appalachian mountains range from Georgia to Canada, porions of which contain significant uranium ore veins, there's going to be a considerable amount of radon gas emitted by these veins as they go through the natural process of decay. What does this mean? Inevitably, there will be false positives as well. More people will be detained, more public outcry.
On a momentary tangent, I have difficulty putting too much weight in New Scientist's journalistic integrity. For example, why haven't pacemakers set off the alarms? While they may be shielded to a certain degree for safety, I doubt that they're 100% shielded against detection.
And what of nuclear power plant employees, or students of radiological sciences in college, or radiotherapy doctors in hospitals? All of these pick up marginally higher levels of radiation in their fields, why aren't they setting off alarms either?
To ensure against repeats of that article, the police need to (at least) inform the public of the minimum level of radiation that the sensors will trip on, so that at least innocent people won't be grabbed by police, just because they were picking up an old Radium book they won in an auction online.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Don't fire alarms use radiological material?
Not fire alarms, but smoke detectors. They use a small amount of Americium in smoke detectors as well as some of those nifty advanced smoke/vapor detectors you might find in data centers. Still, I see the number of cases of people carrying smoke detectors through the subways in New York as rather small.
Depends upon the type of radiation source and the detector in use. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation are different animals and emitted by radioisotopes in different amounts.
Alpha particles are helium nucleii without electrons; beta particles are electrons; gamma radiation is electromagnetic radiation similar to X-Rays. Alpha and beta radiation are mostly stopped by inches to feet of air; gamma is more or less unaffected. Harmful doses are more complicated to assess, but basically, alpha and beta emitters are typically harmful when they get into your body and emit particles right next to cells, where they cause ionizing damage. Inserting alpha and beta emitters within a tumor is, essentially, what one form of radiotherapy does; put deadly ionizing radiation into a tumor to kill it. Radium has been an effective treatment for breast cancer (one of the first reasonably successful ones) since the 1920's.
Gamma radiation, although it passes through many feet of air and well into tissue, is not as damaging because it is not ionizing. However, high exposures have significant impacts. Gamma will pass through metals more or less unaffected.
The detectors are likely designed to pick up gamma radiation characteristic of enriched fissionable materials, because gamma passes through several feet of air. However, certain types of radiotheraputic isotopes (e.g. radium) also emit a heck of a lot of gamma.
Thus, the dilema of false positives for radiotherapy patients. If you want to pick up enriched radioisotopes, you will pick up gamma from legitimate theraputic uses. 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.
I'm guessing you probably don't know a lot about the radation treatment of the thyroid so allow me to explain:
They give you radioactive iodine (I believe it's I-131, but I could be wrong) in a non-tribial dose. This will then accumulate in your thyroid. Now It has a pretty short half life, around 8 days, so it doesn't stay in you in a significant quantity for all that long. Also, since it accumulates in the thyroid, damage to teh rest of the body is limited.
However, notice that I said non-trivial dose. It's enough that you are warned to limit contact with family members for a week, and enough that you can tell if someone has had it done just by pointing a Giger counter at them.
Along the same lines, my grandma has two metal hips, and is gaurenteed to set off any metal decetor. Well she isn't stupid about it, if she knows she's going through one, she notifies the people that she has metal hips, and they can take the appropriate setps to verify her story.
So why does the ethnicity of the racist asshole who made this comment matter? Racists exist in all races. Why does this suprise you?
Similar to the issues raised in the disscusion on the spammer who was complaining about too much spam, some people have no empathy. They can't understand that their actions are wrong even if they've gone or are going through the same thing.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Al Quaida got EXACTLY what they wanted on 9/11/2001! Granted, a few thousand died that day..and a couple of buildings went down...but since then lives have been made miserable for MILLIONS...which is exactly what they wanted to to to us! Our freedoms have been curtailed at the airport..like they'll ever try that again..If they did, they'd be thrown out the window by an entire pissed off airplane. The old ideas of hijacking were to comply with the hijackers' demands...but not any more!! Now we have cancer patients being strip searched whose only crime is taking the subway. We have TV cameras looking at us everywhere, connected up to facial reckognization systems. We have more freedoms curtailed since World War II and unlike the ones then, these loss of freedoms are permanent. Yes, the terrorists got exactly what they wanted..a shift in the United States' citizens' right to freedom. The irony is that the REAL terrorists are Bush and Ashcroft and Congress who've perverted this awful event for their own political ends.
I should play the lottery, considering how often I get picked for "random" searches... 100% so far.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
McDonald's installed one also, but they had to take it down because their Secret Sauce kept setting it off.
Table-ized A.I.
Honestly, all this will do is cause an unholy incovenience to cancer patients such that it gets into the media, at which point any self respecting terrorist who can do a bit of research will figure out that he should just avoid the subways.
Duh.
You do that math, that's some senstive equipment they have in the White House.
/=/ 10^19 times fewer, about say a thousand (this is rounded to the nearest power of 10). If he's near the detector for about say 1 minute, that's about a 500th of a halflife so we can expect, what, one of the atoms to decay? Even if the gamma hits the detector (probably another 10,000 to 1 against), it's below the noise threshold, and they certainly can't pick him out of the crowd. Maybe if it were two weeks, or there were a less common isotope with a longer half-life mixed in, I could believe it.
It can't be that sensitive. Suppose they put about 20 millimoles in him (that's a lot, especially just for imaging). About 10^22 atoms (Avogadro, remember him?). After 3*7*3=63 halflives there about 2^63
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I guess we haven't heard any stories about timex setting off the nuke detectors...so it can't be all that bad can it?
Tritium gives off beta particles, I believe (either that or it's alpha particles). They cannot penetrate the glass or plastic face of the watch, nor the bezel. They stay within the watch, and so pose no risk. But that's somewhat irrelevant given the rarified particle count and the nature of beta particles.
As for your gunsight, the tiny dot of tritium gives off next to no radiation, but in any case the particles only travel a few inches at most. You'd have to practically touch it to the radiation detector to set it off, if even that would do it.
I have a Vaseline glass bead I use to test my Geiger counters with, and it has to be taken out of its paper sleeve and placed next to the detector tube to be measurable. Within a centimeter or two it puts off 20 times the normal background radiation, but 10 centimeters away you can barely tell the difference. It's the uranium in the green tint that exudes radioactive particles, but the quantity of radiation and the nature of beta particles make it effectively undetectible at any range. My guess is that your tritium sight is even less radioactive.
Easy. Just don't eat for a week or so as to get a terrible face, don't sleep either. Then shave completly your head. Your face will be gaunt and you *will* looks like a cancer patient. Then wait that a few false alarm happen in the media, go in the subway.
When the alarm sound have some faked paper about a cancer treatment by radiation. When the guy come to you jsut show the paper. Chance are that in a year or so after so much false alarm they let you thru after seeing you (now really bad looking and not looking like a terrorist).
Think the scenario is far etched ? Think again. Human can also be pavlov trained to ignore false alarm if they come too often. That is why setting a detection level in an alarm is a science in itself.
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"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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yep... it's almost an urban legend, though there have evidently been two such instances... Here's a link
Snopes.com
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Camping lantern mantles contain either thorium or yttrium for a metal that aids in lighting performance and does well in heat.
Most new mantles are yttrium and are non-radioactive, but from all accounts the older thorium mantles were superior.
Thorium emits alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. It does this regardless of whether it is heated or not.
On a sidenote, tritium can't be detected by a geiger counter even when bare because the radioactivity in it is that weak (you have to use a scintillation counter over time), and smoke detectors exclusively emit alpha radiation and can't be detected by a geiger counter beyond about 1 cm from the GM tube.
I have a geiger counter I made and it's a lot of fun to play around with. A family member recieved a thyroid test using iodine-131 and I could detect the radioactivity from over two feet away.
That's interesting.. but what does chemotherapy have to do with radiation treatment?
And for the grandparent post... if you really think gamma radiation is not ionizing, and want to go telling the world that, go hang out with some gamma emitters for a while first, THEN come tell us how it passes harmlessly through things.
Alpha & Beta radiation, outside the body, cause radiation damage primarily in the skin. The higher the energy, the further they penetrate, of course. Gamma radiation, however, will pass right through you, causing damage to your internal organs along the way.
What is ionizing radiation?
Gamma radiation is VERY ionizing. Why do you think it causes cancer? Why do you think it casues radiation poisoning in high doses? What do you think radiation poisoning is?
Sorry folks , but this isnt Chemotherapy or Bracytherapy ... brachytherapy is irradiation with
sealed sources which are inside the body .
Best name for this is Nuclear Medicine Therapy. ... by the way , I am a Radiation Therapist and
a Nuclear Medicine Technologist
tswinzig wrote:
> Too low? I'd say the detectors are working just
> right. Yeah it sucks for these patients, but they
> can work this out.
Those patients have rights! They should not be stripped searched because they are receiving treatment for a terminal illness. They should not have to carry papers to prove to the police that they are not terrorists. And they should not be barred from using public transportation.
> I'd much rather have a few false positives than
> possibly miss a dirty bomb shielded in lead.
If a dirty bomb was properly shielded, it wouldn't give a true positive (though there are far easier nukes to shield). The police would be busy strip searching cancer patients while the terrorists walked on through. I'm actually surprised with all the pollution from nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties that any detector could work reliably without giving off tons of false positives.
Perhaps everyone should just ride the subways (fly in airplanes, etc.) in their birthday suits. But that might violate your rights, which might induce you to care.
As for the mean terrorists: if they play with nuclear fire, they are gonna get burned, big time. That's what the Red Bamboo found out in 1966, the hard way.
"Once we wake Godzilla, he'll take care of those guys."
Ichiro "Godzilla, Ebira, Mothra: Big Duel in the South Sea" (Japanese version, 1966)
As it was before, may it be again. Grant us this, Godzilla! ("Godzilla March")
no.
All round trip. All booked well in advance. Beard is neatly trimmed, hair is short and combed, prescription medicine is in my name, car stereo should have been questioned at the security entrance after going through the X-ray (not at the gate), I wear clean clothes, and nothing to suggest that I am a member of any small minority faction...
These trips were from SMALL airports to SMALL airports. Connecting flights were at large airports but generally at the large airports is where the 20% of skipping came in.
Toledo -> Pittsburgh -> Scranton
Minneapolis -> Philadelphia -> Scranton
Dayton -> Charolette -> Savannah
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.