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FedEx Misplaces Radioactive Rods
Hugh Pickens writes "A shipment of radioactive rods used in medical equipment has vanished while being sent by FedEx from North Dakota to Tennessee. Based on tracking information, FedEx is focusing its search in the Tennessee area, but as a normal precaution the company alerted all of its stations 'in the event that it got waylaid and went to another station by accident.' Dr. Marc Siegel says if someone opens the container it could pose some serious health risks. 'I don't believe it has the degree of radiation that, if it were opened, your skin would suddenly slough off. But the concern would be, if this got opened inadvertently and someone didn't know what it was and then was repeatedly exposed to it over several days, it could cause a problem with radiation poisoning,' says Siegel. 'The people that use this equipment in a hospital use protective shielding with it.' The lesson is that active medical material must always be transported in a way that ensures the general public cannot get access to it. 'Medical devices should not be FedExed. They should be sent under a special service,' adds Siegel."
TFA clearly states that the rods were located and its radioactive container was not opened.
"The rods were incased in a metal container called a "pig" that contains their radiation. Munoz said when they were recovered at the Knoxville station Friday no one had opened that casing."
"Everything's fine, the pig itself was not opened, and we're making arrangements to deliver it to the recipient," Munoz said.
If it glows, it goes.
Want to bet that the hospital was following the manufacturer's instructions for an RMA?
According to TFA the rods have now been recovered, unopened at a FedEx facility in Knoxville. Panic over.
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Why do you have a problem with me using Fedex to ship somebody across the country some radioactive fiesta-ware they bought from me on eBay?
"Radioactive" doesn't automatically signify "dangerous".
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
FedEx (and other carriers) handle materials like this all the time. Also, if you had bothered to do a little more research you would have found this article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-26/fedex-seeks-missing-shipment-of-radioactive-rods-used-in-ct-scan.html
quoute:
"The recovered cylinder, which was about 10 inches long and weighed 20 pounds, contained four rods of germanium-68, used in medical-imaging cameras. Their total radioactivity is 684 megaBecquerels, the equivalent of about 18 microcuries, said David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The rods are among the least significant sources of radioactivity from health and security perspectives, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
If someone had opened the canister, “it would take like 1,000 hours of exposure to get a skin blister,” Munoz said."
Ummm... a few points:
1) FedEx is, as far as I know, the only major carrier that handles radioactive material. It doesn't go in their regular package delivery system; they have a separate division that handles it (and biohazards, poisons, explosives, and things like that). See: http://www.fedex.com/us/services/customcritical/specialty/hazardous/index.html
2) No delivery service is going to be 100% mistake free. Negative outcomes will happen in life. Get over it.
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" 'Medical devices should not be FedExed. They should be sent under a special service,' adds Siegel."
What a chickensh*t dick! He wants us to pay a HUGE price supplement for any shipment of anything marked 'medical equipment'. After all, he's not paying for it.
So instead of a shipment of a case of wooden tongue depressers being sent for $25 it will cost $350 because it is marked 'medical equipment'. You know this will happen.
If something is delicate or harmful_if_opened then just F*CKING mark it so when shipped. It doesn't matter if it's nuclear fuel rods or one-drop-kills-the-whole-block snake venom or whatever. Give it a 'special' tracking number. Mark the package in bright orange stickers written in English and Spanish "Don't open this package, nitwit! because you could die and take out the people around you also." Make sure that you don't lose it. You are a global shipping company: you're supposed to know what you're doing.
Warn people about the consequences about being stupid, and, having warned them, refuse to accept any responsibility for the bad things that happen when people ignore your warning.
By the way, if something is labeled -Dangerous!- -Hazard!- -Caution!- don't tell me that you're not to blame for messing with it because the label was in English and you only speak Spanish or whatever. Learn a few English words like 'caution' 'danger' 'warning'. It will serve you better than learning words like 'pussy' or 'Burger King'.
Actually at the time this story was submitted, the rods had not been located.
The story was updated on the Fox News Site after the rods were found but they kept the original URL.
Here is the cached version of the story at the time it was submitted as a story to Slashdot.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=radioactive+rods+fox+news&d=1094018597270&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=d977f9e4,d2527ef2
FedEx Searching for Radioactive Shipment That Vanished Between N.D. and Tenn.
By Diane Macedo
Published November 26, 2010
| FoxNews.com
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - FedEx reports that a shipment of radioactive rods used in medical equipment has vanished while being sent from North Dakota to Tennessee.
FedEx spokeswoman Sandra Munoz says the rods, which are used for quality control in CT scans, were being returned to their manufacturer in Knoxville, Tenn., from a hospital in Fargo, N.D. Three shipments left the hospital earlier this week, but only two arrived at their destination.
"We're looking for that third one," Munoz told FoxNews.com.
Based on tracking information, FedEx is focusing its search in the Tennessee area, Munoz said, but as a normal precaution the company alerted all of its stations "in the event that it got way late and went to another station by accident."
The rods are incased in a metal container called a pig that Munoz says is roughly 10 inches tall and weighs about 20 pounds.
"As long as people do not try to open the metal container they will not be exposed to any remaining radiation," she said.
But Fox News Medical Contributor Dr. Marc Siegel says if someone does open the container it could pose some serious health risks.
"I don't believe it has the degree of radiation that, if it were opened, your skin would suddenly slop off. But the concern would be, if this got opened inadvertently and someone didn't know what it was and then was repeatedly exposed to it over several days, it could cause a problem with radiation poisoning," Siegel said. "The people that use this equipment in a hospital use protective shielding with it."
The lesson here, he says, is that active medical material must always be transported in a way that ensures that the general public cannot get access to it.
"Medical devices should not be FedEx'ed. They should be sent under a special service," Siegel said. "There are courier services and several other ways to do that without getting into the general pool. I think that was a mistake that's not generally the way medical supplies are sent.
"If FedEx wants to be involved in transporting medical materials, it should be completely separate and with all kinds of checks and balances so this can't happen," he added.
Munoz says FedEx follows a series of regulations when transporting objects like the rods in this shipment. This was no exception.
"There are regulations on how this type of equipment has to be packaged, the quantities that can be shipped, and we were all within the regulatory requirements," she said.
I had a nuclear scan scheduled for a week after the 9/11 attack. I suddenly started getting one or two calls a day from the medical center... it's off, it might be a week out, it might be two weeks out, we don't know... hey, come in your scheduled time, we just got a trickle of material, and we can do 8 or 9 tests.
the issue is, of course, the planes weren't flying. the special courier services weren't allowed to operate. the FedEx and UPS planes weren't allowed to operate. it's too far to drive the material. they finally found two containers of material at a distributor ten miles away that was to go out of activity tolerance in a day and a half.
a shipping container for, let's say for the sake of not spilling the beans, under a dozen doses, has three layers of radioactive protection. there are two layers of spillproof/shatterproof for both the short-lived nucleotide and the source that creates it from another short-lived nucleotide.
so, just as drunken truck drivers can move classified "special weaponry" across the country routinely, as we read earlier this week, certain amounts of radiostuff packed to standard X can be shipped per courier flight. not enough to wipe out a city, a little more than you are allowed without a higher-tier inspection system.
but do be advised it's not good stuff to keep around as a curiousity.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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Apparently, it was 684 MBq of Germanium (which should mean it's 76Ge). Unfortunately, that isotope is not in any of my data sheets, so I can't tell you what that means in terms of dose rate...
Correction: it was 68Ge. As I stated, I couldn't find it in my data sheets, so I just looked at a list of germanium isotopes - which only listed naturally occurring ones. Silly me!
I do however have data for the next step in the decay chain, 68Ga (68Ge decays by electron capture, so let's just disregard that first decay). The first sheet I found put it at 0.103 mSv/h/MBq beta skin dose and 0.173 mSv/h/MBq gamma at 30 cm. At 684 MBq, that means a dose rate of about 70 and 120 mSv/h at 30 cm, respectively.
So no, these sources weren't particularly dangerous. Even at that close a distance (if you don't speak metric, 30 cm is about a foot), it would take half a day of exposure to become acutely ill (radiation sickness starts setting in at around 1 Sv). And as radiation sources don't tend to be that big, you can probably consider these rods point sources, which means that the inverse square law applies: at double the distance - only 60 cm - it would take four times as long.
As a former resident of Memphis who knew a number of Fedex employees there at the Fedex corporate office, there are a number of very bright Fedex employes in tennessee, and even the delivery drivers claim that they have greater oversight there since they are so close to the main office.
A single misplaced package doesn't imply incompetence given the millions of packages delivered daily. I've sent hundreds of packages (including when I lived in TN) through Fedex and only had one get completely lost. I've had a similar experience with UPS.
They already have a procedure for accepting radioactive goods, why would they change that because of a single temporarily misplaced package? It's not like this is the first radioactive package they've hauled, and I'm sure it's not the first that they've misplaced.
... some dumbasses from FedEx delivered me radioactive rods, instead of blood diamonds. The Princess was not amused, and said that a necklace of radioactive rods would not get her a place on Dancing with the Stars!
The royal physician snooped around with his Geiger counter, before screaming "Holy fucking shit! Jesus fucking Christ!" He then proceeded to get his hairy ass out of the Royal Quarters.
If anyone is interested in buying radioactive bars, please send me your bank account IDs, passwords, and anything else that you shouldn't send to strangers.
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This thread is retarded. There's nothing in this story has to do with big government vs small government, or public vs private.
Something got screwed up in this instance. In a complex system with high volume and lots of humans involved, that's going to happen. 100% perfection is impossible. It's impossible for government, and it's impossible for corporations.
What we CAN fix is buffoons who take a totally unrelated story and try to twist it to fit whatever ideology they want to push.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I cannot believe someone thought it was a good idea to FedEx radioactive material. Someone needs to be fired.
Why would it be wrong to hire a shipping company - in this case, FedEx - which has extensive experience in handling moderately hazardous materials and is properly licensed to do so?
FedEx Ground will handle Class 7 Radioactive Material I materials (bearing the 'radioactive white I' placards and labels) only; that's the lowest class.
Material meets the White I threshold if the measured radioactivity at the surface of the shipping package does not exceed 0.5 millirem per hour; most White I packages actually fall far below that level. The legal maximum exposure for civilians in the U.S. is 500 millirem per year, and 'radiation workers' are permitted ten times that. Even if we assume that the package is right at the edge of what's permissible, you would have to strap the box directly to your ass for more than a month to get close to the civilian limit.
Could one get a higher dose if you opened the package and removed the radioactive material from its inner container(s)? Sure -- but that takes a special kind of stupid. All of the packaging is going to be emblazoned with the 'radiation' trefoil symbol; you've got to assume that even if the package were routed to the wrong destination, the receiver is going to hand it right back to the FedEx guy. (Unless, of course, it's a recipient who regularly handles radioactives, in which case, still no worries.)
This isn't a case where someone decided to cut corners and put radioactive material in an unmarked box to save a few bucks on shipping. It was properly packaged, properly labelled material, accompanied by all the appropriate paperwork and handed over to an approved, accredited, regulated shipper. Yes, someone at FedEx screwed up, but it looks like their procedures for handling lost packages seem to have worked as they should. This is a non-story which is being blown out of proportion by people who don't understand and can't appropriately weigh the risks of handling radioactive materials. ~~~~
~Idarubicin
I've sent hazardous materials, some radioactive via a variety of carriers. LET ME TELL YOU that FedEx is much worse. They go blabbing all over the news making an embarrassing lot of fuss and generally alarming the public when they lose something like this. UPS however they just don't care. Lose a pound of plutonium, no big deal, happens all the time just fill in the insurance claim and go on your way and we certainly won't tell anyone.
So yes it is not sensible at all to use FedEx for these sorts of things. Way too much hassle.
Yeah, I see something like that on the intro to the Simpsons every week.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Don't you know anything about programming?
I was talking about shipping packages, not programming. Don't you know anything about marsupials? :^P
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