Safety violations detected in nuclear medicine labs — AERB

Other violations include employment of under-qualified staff, deviations from the approved layout and poor housekeeping.

While AERB has taken follow-up action to remedy the situation, the feedback from recent inspections indicates that tighter measures including regulatory restrictions are necessary, a report from AERB said.

"The conditions observed were not defendable," it said.

Referring to an earlier case when AERB took restrictive action against a radiotherapy department of a major hospital in Delhi for violating essential safety provisions, the report warned that "if conditions do not improve, similar action may have to be taken against defaulting nuclear medicine laboratories.

It said that in one institution, even regulatory requirements for safe handling of raido isotopes were not followed.

The team found that in one foreign laboratory, a worker had accidentally ingested radioactive iodine from a contaminated ball point pen in his office. Once iodine enters the body, it gets concentrated in the thyroid.

Similarly, a few years ago, a nail-biting technician, who handled radio iodine without wearing safety gloves, was found to have ingested raioactive iodine, the report said.

It clarified that the faulty procedures carried out in these institutions may not have resulted in high radiation doses to workers or the public as the amounts of radio isotopes handled were not very high.

But tighter regulatory measures are necessary to improve the situation, it observed.