I was at an international conference in Madrid, Spain in the summer of 2004 when I was accosted by a member of the delegation from the Philippines. She told me of a Filipino physician who had set up a cancer therapy clinic and who obtained a used radiation therapy source from a hospital in the [...]
I’ve never had the experience of having a gun pointed at me but I’m guessing that it would make me wish mightily for a gun of my own to help even the odds. I do know that whenever my submarine ventured near the Soviet Union we knew that their ships were armed and we took [...]
Let’s use this week’s post to speculate a little bit. Let’s think about a world in which cancer is no longer feared. This is not necessarily a world without cancer – but at least one in which cancer is routinely prevented or treated, so that it is more like pneumonia or (at worst) diabetes. This [...]
As an undergraduate student at Ohio State (I studied Geology) I was intrigued to find that hydrogeologists were indirect fans of the era of nuclear weapons testing. By “indirect” I mean that they didn’t really approve of the testing itself, but they loved the fact that the radioactivity put into the environment could be quite [...]
Say a dirty bomb goes off in your city – say contamination is spread over a few billion dollars’ worth of property. Government buildings are contaminated. Parks are contaminated. So are trendy restaurants and gentrifying apartment buildings, subway tracks and cars and busses. Tens of thousands of people are contaminated as well as are many [...]
The unknown frightens us a whole lot more than the known – we can plan on how to deal with hazards we know about while the unknown leaves us unprepared. When my son was young, for example, he was afraid of the dark. Or, rather, he was frightened of the things he could not see [...]
Anniversaries are important dates. They mark the return of the Earth to its previous position against the firmament – the completion of a year – they give us the opportunity to reflect on events that were important in our lives, on their significance, and how these events have affected us. March 11 – this Sunday [...]
My Great-Uncle Harvey was the only physician I knew as a kid. He delivered my father, my aunt, me, and my sister; he visited me in the hospital when I had my tonsils out; gave us our shots; and attended to all of the other minutiae of keeping us all healthy. In fact, it wasn’t [...]
I am a health physicist. And no, this is not the first admission in a 12-step program – more like a statement that means very little to most of the people in the US. If I tell the person next to me on a plane, for example, that I am a health physicist they usually [...]
The last few weeks have brought a little more information about the radioactive tissue boxes I wrote about in an earlier posting. Since this topic is important and because it raises interesting issues it’s worth an update, so here goes.