A Cancer Patient ’s Radioactive Remains Are Raising Fears of Contamination

About half of all Americans are cremated when they die. So when a 69-year-old man was cremated in Arizona in 2017, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary — until doctors learned that his body may have put others at risk of radiation exposure. In 2017, the man was admitted to a hospital for low blood pressure treatment, according to a new research letter published in JAMA. But unbeknownst to his doctors, the man had been treated at the Mayo Clinic Arizona just the day before, where he had been injected with lutetium 177, a radiopharmaceutical used to combat his pancreatic cancer. When the man died two days after being admitted to the second hospital, doctors there didn’t know about his medical history, and Mayo Clinic doctors had no idea he had died. So when the patient was cremated five days after his death, no one thought anything of it — at first. “For this particular therapy, patients can receive up to four treatments separated by eight weeks,” says Kevin Nelson, a radiation safety officer at the Mayo Clinic and co-author of the research letter, who was involved in the patient’s care. “We were expecting him to come back to get treated again in eight weeks. We discovered shortly after the initial treatment that he had died at this other hospital.” Some states, such as Florida, forbid the cremation of anything other than human remains, including radioactive material. But in Arizona, there are no regulations that require cre...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime medicine Source Type: news