“I remember in Geneva, two months ago, we said, 'Pay attention, because there is a risk of shortage if there is a problem with one of the reactors operating in this specific week' – and that's what happened,” David Crunell recalls. So do the spokespersons for Nuclear Medicine Europe (NMEU), an industry union.
Due to their nature, it is impossible to store these radioactive materials – they are fleeting. Technetium-99m works as a radioactive tracer because, as it decays, it emits gamma rays with a photon energy of 140 keV. Kathy Cutler, chair of isotope research and production at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US, says this is “pretty ideal” for detection using a gamma ray camera.
But technetium-99m has a very short half-life, only six hours or so. Hence why radioisotope-producing facilities send miniature generators containing molybdenum-99 to hospitals. These generators, sometimes called “Molly cows”, produce the desired technetium-99m as molybdenum-99 decays – much like a portable vending machine for technetium-99m, which runs out after about two weeks. When molybdenum-99 is completely destroyed. Decayed.
Glenn Flux, head of radioisotope physics at the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research in London, says that what makes a technetium-99m scan different from a CT or MRI scan is that it detects patients' organs or tumors. Is. Working—for example, by increasing blood flow to the area in question.
“CT will show you whether the tumor is there or not, but technetium or other isotopes will tell you whether it is active or aggressive,” Flux explains.
Stephen Harden, vice president of clinical radiology at the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), estimates that a few thousand appointments were canceled in the UK alone due to the recent radioisotope shortage. Health care workers sprang into action to distribute the remaining radioisotope supplies across the UK, to ensure that the most urgent patients – for example, those suffering from cancer – were still able to attend their scans. “If there wasn't a nationally coordinated policy in place, there would be significant areas of the country with no supply at all,” says Harden.
Crunelle and his colleagues at NMEU continuously monitor medical radioisotope production at major reactors around the world. They know about the maintenance schedule in advance, and, thus, the NMEU will often advise reactor heads to push these dates back slightly – for example, to reduce the risk of multiple shutdowns occurring at the same time. To help. NMEU staff use software, a type of reactor maintenance calendar, that allows them to forecast production levels. But sometimes unexpected events happen, like the pipe problem in Petton.