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Man pulled over for being radioactive Last Wednesday, Mike Apatow was getting on to Interstate 84 in Newtown, CT, when police stopped him for no reason he could determine. When the cop told him that his car had set off his radioactivity detectors, it started making sense: Apatow was most certainly radioactive. Earlier in the day, Apatow had had a bit of radioactive material injected into his veins. He wasn't trying to turn himself into a superhero—just trying to keep himself alive. The off-duty firefighter had gone to a cardiology office to have a cardiac stress test, which tracks the...

WASHINGTON — Just as the worldwide shortage of a radioactive isotope used in millions of medical procedures is about to get worse, officials say a new source for the substance has emerged: a nuclear reactor in Poland. The isotope, technetium 99, is used to measure blood flow in the heart and to help diagnose bone and breast cancers. Almost two-thirds of the world’s supply comes from two reactors; one, in Ontario, has been shut for repairs for nine months and is not expected to reopen before April, and the other, in the Netherlands, will close for six months starting Friday....

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....

WASHINGTON — A global shortage of a radioactive drug crucial to tests for cardiac disease, cancer and kidney function in children is emerging because two aging nuclear reactors that provide most of the world’s supply are shut for repairs. The 51-year-old reactor in Ontario, Canada, that produces most of this drug, a radioisotope, has been shut since May 14 because of safety problems, and it will stay shut through the end of the year, at least. Some experts fear it will never reopen. The isotope, technetium-99m, is used in more than 40,000 medical procedures a day in the United States....

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....

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. McEwan said the nuclear medicine society has long pushed for the United States to build its own reactor to produce medical materials. That hasn’t happened for a variety of reasons, including cost, he said. He called that “shortsighted.”

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Hal O. Anger, a pioneer of nuclear medicine who is credited with inventing the gamma camera, has died. He was 85. Anger died at his Berkeley home on Oct. 31. Called a "quiet genius" whose "instruments are still in common use today, diagnosing cancer, metabolic disorders and heart disease" by the Society of Nuclear Medicine, Anger developed his most noted invention in 1957, employing gamma radiation to depict metabolic processes within a living body. Born May 24, 1920, in Denver, Anger cultivated an interest in electronics as a boy growing up in Long Beach, where he...