Sunday, January 28, 2007

Radioactive Non-Superheroes

Numerous comic book superheroes start their careers by being exposed to radiation or radioactive substances of some sort. In those (fictional) cases, the effects are sometimes bizarre (not to mention unsightly), but our erstwhile heroes always find a way to turn their new situations to some advantage.

It turns out that exposure to radioactive substances happens in our much more boring reality, too. Unfortunately, it never confers superpowers. If anything, it tends to produce occasions for great annoyance. This Reuters report describes the rising incidence of innocent civilians triggering radiation detectors at security checkpoints because of the presence of medical radioisotopes in their bodies. The article tells how six people triggered the radiation detectors at this past year's Christmas tree-lighting party at NYC's Rockefeller Center.
"All six had recently had medical treatments with radioisotopes in their bodies," Richard Falkenrath, the city's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, told a Republican governors' meeting in Miami recently. "That happens all the time."
The article also tells of an even more humiliating incident:

In August, the British Medical Journal described the case of a very embarrassed 46-year-old Briton who set off the sensors at Orlando airport in Florida six weeks after having radioiodine treatment for a thyroid condition.

He was detained, strip-searched and sniffed by police dogs before eventually being released, the journal said in its "Lesson of the Week" section.


Something like this happened to a friend of mine a couple of years ago. Ermanno is an Italian-born naturalized citizen. At the time of this incident he was living in upstate New York, but working a lot in Ann Arbor. As a cost-saving measure, he actually drove back and forth between the two locations. He began having back problems, which became increasingly severe. One night they were so severe, he ended up in the ER at the University of Michigan Hospital. He had a whole battery of tests. They finally determined that his back pain was caused largely by the fact that he was sitting on his rather out-sized wallet for those ten-hour drives back and forth to New York.

The good news was that this diagnosis showed him how to eliminate his back pain immediately, namely, always take out his wallet before he went on long drives. The bad news occurred a day or so later, when he drove back to New York. He always took the most direct route, which went from Ann Arbor, to Detroit, through Canada, and back into New York at Niagra Falls. All went well until he tried to cross back into the States. To his mystified dismay, he triggered the radiation detector at the security checkpoint.

The border guards didn't put him through a strip-search, but they did turn his car inside out, searched his luggage, etc. It didn't look good: here he was, a foreign national, driving a rental car, triggering a radiation alarm as he crossed into U.S. territory. (Remember, this was only a year or two after 9/11.)

Finally, after questioning Ermanno about his recent activities, one of the more intelligent border people had the bright idea that the radioactivity might be due to one of medical procedures he had been through. They called UM Hospital's ER and found that, sure enough, one of the tests he had been through involved injecting a radioisotope. If had waited another day or so, the natural decay of the radioactive material would have reduced it to below detectable levels. But alas ...

The Reuters article speculates that it might be wise to start carrying a note from your doctor describing the reason you seem radioactive. This problem is probably just going to get worse, as detectors become more sensitive, and able to pick up radioisotope traces even weeks after their use. It isn't entirely far-fetched to worry that eventually we may all have to start carrying not only our identification papers at all times, but our medical records, too.

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