Free Republic

Global production of the feedstock for the leading medical-imaging isotope is low and erratic, putting health care in jeopardy. Within the next two weeks, the vast majority of radioactive-imaging medical tests could be delayed or replaced by less desirable procedures. The reason: temporary shutdowns of Canadian and Dutch reactors that together normally provide some 70 percent of the world’s supplies of the isotope molybdenum-99 and at least 80 percent of North American supplies. Each week, U.S. doctors prescribe some 300,000 medical-imaging tests that rely on technetium-99m, a radioactive isotope produced from molybdenum-99. About half of those tests measure heart function....

AP Science Writer Thousands of patients are facing delays in crucial medical tests because of a shortage of a radioactive substance used in those examinations - all because of the shutdown of one nuclear reactor in Canada. The substance is used in at least 15 million medical scans a year in the United States, by one estimate. Those scans are used to diagnose and assess a wide variety of conditions including cancer, heart disease and bone or kidney illnesses. They are often crucial for guiding therapy, telling a doctor whether a woman's breast cancer has invaded her bones, for example....