FIRST UNIT TO GAUGE HUMAN RADIO-ACTIVITY

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30761, 27 May 1965, Page 17

FIRST UNIT TO GAUGE HUMAN RADIO-ACTIVITY

The first unit in New Zealand capable of monitoring the radioactivity present in a human body will be installed at the Christchurch Hospital.

| Installation of the unit, estimated to cost £36.000. has been approved in principle by the Health Department.

' The unit will be housed in a room so heavily shielded against normal background radiation that the background radiation inside will be less

than a fiftieth of that outside. Extremely sensitive equipment inside the room will enable the total body radioactivity of a person to be measured to a high accuracy. Attempts to measure the radio-active body load withlout extensive shielding are severely handicapped, if not impossible, by the normal background. At first the unit will be used by the radiotherapy department of the Christchurch Hospital, the Medical Unit of of the North Canterbury Hospital Board and the National Radiation Laboratory of the Health Department.

The laboratory will staff and maintain the unit. The National Radiation

Laboratory will use the unit in connexion with its longterm investigation of low levels of radiation—part of its statutory duties to monitor, for health and safety, the extent to which natural and artificial radio-isotopes are taken into the human body. The radiotherapy department and Medical Unit will be enabled by the new unit to reduce the dose of radio-active-tracer materials necessary to follow processes of life within patients, and also in many cases to introduce tracer techniques for measurements which are now made

by laborious and expensive chemical methods or may not be possible at all.