Things are definitely looking down for the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre, Canada, where 326 cancer patients were exposed to wrong dose of radiations for a long span of 3 years! Apparently, the patients afflicted by basal and squamous cell carcinomas were administered radiations as low as 17 percent from the prescribed intensity between November 2004 and November 2007. A permissible variation is somewhere around 5 to 7 percent, in this case 17 percent sounds rather drastic and it’s believed that patients with aggressive melanoma skin cancer were not even close to being cured with such an exposure.
Dr. Chris Carruthers, chief of the medical staff at the Ottawa Hospital, was noticably regretful when he said,
We regret what happened and don’t want to create a lot of anxiety and worry. However, the patients should be monitored and we should watch them to see if the underdosing really had any effect over time.
This aberration, although, is critical but the measures taken to counteract the same seem convincing. Not only are the in-house oncologists looking into the matter by reviewing progress of the patients but an independent and external team has been asked to review this case as well.
It was a result of a major miscalculated programming error during shifting of machines but a number of patients got the right amount of treatment in spite of the programming fault owing to the correct beam size. Even though technology is fool-proof and absolute, human errors can always happen, this incident is a testimony to the same. One can only bask in the satisfaction that an overdose would have done more harm than an underdose and hence, the situation is under control.
Source: CBC
Image: LA Times