Posted on 10/11/2009 2:44:35 PM PDT by La Enchiladita
More than 200 patients undergoing CT brain scans at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center got doses of radiation eight times higher than normal, prompting the Food and Drug Administration to issue an alert to prevent similar problems, it was reported Saturday.
About 40 percent of the patients lost patches of hair as a result of the overdoses, a hospital spokesman told the Los Angeles Times. The overdoses went undetected for 18 months, raising questions about why it took Cedars-Sinai so long to notice that something was wrong.
"The magnitude of these overdoses and their impact on the affected patients were significant," the FDA alert issued Thursday states. "This situation may reflect more widespread problems with CT quality assurance programs and may not be isolated to this particular facility or this imaging procedure."
State health officials are investigating what happened.
"We're looking into two possibilities," FDA spokeswoman Peper Long told the newspaper. "It could be the device, or it could be the procedures that were followed."
(Excerpt) Read more at dailybreeze.com ...
Thank you. That would be nice.
Thank you for keeping me in the loop.
Pray tell what a warning on the cat scan machine will accomplish?
I would suggest a governor should prevent the machine being set to an exposure that is 8 times the prescribed level of exposure.
Why that isn’t the norm is beyond me.
One approach they will take is to go after the manufacturer of the machine. But if there was a defect in the machinery, Cedars people should have detected it sooner; in fact, before they even bought or leased it.
It would be interesting to know how they detected it. It would seem that they wouldn’t be getting the appropriate readings with an inappropriate setting.
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