Radioactive Dummy In Luggage

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30561, 2 October 1964, Page 1

Radioactive Dummy In Luggage

Special provision has been made by the Department of External Affairs and the Customs Department to avoid any unnecessary queries over the luggage of an important visitor who will arrive at Whenuapai on Monday. The visitor is Dr. G. GomezCrespo, a radiotherapist of the Isotope Division of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, and his luggage includes a radioactive fibreglass human torso and

several radioactive dummy thyroids. Dr. Gomez-Crespo has been visiting various member countries of the agency at their own request as part of a standardisation service offered by the agency in the measurement of the uptake of radioiodine by the human thyroid. Comparisons made a few years ago of the methods and results of such measurements showed considerable divergencies, even as between neighbouring clinics, and as a result the agency recommended standard procedures. Dr. Gomez-Crespo provides through his manikin a means by which clinics in different countries may

' compare their results against the internationally accepted ! standards. The radioactivity of the ’ manikin carried by Dr. Gomez-Crespo is very low—iat approximately, the same l level as in the normal human ■ body. The dummy thyroids, • which are merely small cylin- . ders, carry varying amounts ’ of radioactivity to represent ! different amounts of radioactive iodine taken up from ; iodine-labelled materials. The material of the manikin and the cylinders is an ionexchange resin containing tiny amounts of the radioactive isotopes barium-133 and caesium-137. lodine-131« the isotope used medically, is too short-lived to be useful

in this connexion, but its emission is mimicked by the combination of barium and caesium. In each hospital, measurements are made on the torso as if it were a human patient, the various “thyroids” being inserted in turn. In New Zealand, Dr. Gomez-Crespo will be accompanied by Mr G. E. Roth, director of the National Radiation Laboratory of the Department of Health, Christchurch. They will visit Auckland, Palmerston North. Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. Dr. Gomez-Crespo, a Spaniard, was under Mr Roth when Mr Roth was director of the agency’s Isotope Division during 1959-62.