Apology urged over isotope shortage

Wednesday December 12, 2007
Brantford Expositor
by Susan Gamble

BGH doctor: "We've let the world down"

The Head of nuclear medicine at BGH is calling for a public apology to the "patients of the world" over a critical shortage of medical isotopes.

But first, Dr. Chris O'Brien said Tuesday, the focus needs to be on getting the Chalk River, Ont., nuclear reactor back on stream and producing the isotopes that are necessary for cancer tests across Canada and around the world.

"This is a man-made bureaucratic nightmare," said O'Brien, who is also head of the Ontario Nuclear Medicine Association. "I hope someone is going to make a public apology to the patients of the world."

The Chalk River reactor has been closed since Nov. 18 for maintenance, sparking a world-wide shortage of isotoppes. The isotopes have a short shelf life and can't be stockpiled.

The federal Conservative government is hastily trying to fix the problem with emergency legislation that would force Canada's nuclear safety commission to restart the reactor.

That's happy news for O'Brien, who spent the last week helping to decide which patients at Brantford General Hospital would get the precious radioisotopes that are used to diagnose cancer, pulmonary embolisms, difficult fractures and gastrointestinal bleeding.

"We call the supplier each day and learn how many doses we can get," he said. "Then we look at the records, talk to the referring doctors, examine the history and decide who gets done. This not what I should be doing."

BGH is operating on a day-to-day basis with nuclear imaging.

Hospital Spokesman Gary Chalk said the hospital receives a bigger supply of isotopes at the beginning of the week, with fewer delivered later in the week. The hospital cut about 30 per cent of tests scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, but will likely have to cut more than half by week's end.

O'Brien said he could understand the shortage if it was attributed to the risk of safety problems at the reactor site. But he has learned the sutdown was ordered by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission because of a new regulation, which calls for reactors to have improvements to make them more secure in case of catastrophic events, such as earthquakes or floods.

"The reactor is working fine. It's 50 years old and very stable but during the last inspection they found the improvements hadn't been put into place. So they shut down the reactor and did it without telling anybody. Health Canada wasn't even advised, so the government was blindsided."

O'Brien said the operator of the reactor - which supplies Canada, the U.S., South America and Asia with isotopes - should be reprimanded and the upgrades phased in over the next months.

As head of the association, O'Brien has been fielding calls for the international media, including for the Discovery Channel and the BBC.

"This situation irks me personally because I've been very proud of the fact Canada is supplying the medical isotopes around the world.

"We've let the world down and we need to get the reactor running, then have a review and a public apology".