by Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Reporter and
Heather Mayer, DOTmed News Reporter

In a sweeping and controversial review of environmental factors that cause cancer, a panel reporting to the president highlights the explosive growth in the public's exposure to medical radiation and urges tighter regulations for technicians who work on the radiation-emitting machines. Further, the panel recommends doctors be better informed of radiation's risks to patients.


The three-person President's Cancer Panel (PCP), which presents an annual report on various topics relating to cancer, calls for an active, instead of a reactive, approach to environmental cancer risks and emphasizes the threat they pose to children.

The panel also asks for greater scrutiny of the tens of thousands of industrial and agricultural chemicals people are exposed to, of which only a handful have ever been tested for safety, they say in their 200-page yearly report released Thursday. They also bang the drum about possible dangers from contaminants from military testing and training, as well as the extremely contentious issue of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones and power lines.

MEDICAL RADIATION EXPOSURE

The report aims in part to raise awareness about increases in medical radiation exposure, which has jumped from 15 percent in the 1980s to 48 percent today, the panel said.

"I think [the increase] is attributed to the fact that we have found that diagnostic studies, particularly, have helped us make diagnoses and evaluations we couldn't make before," panel Chair LaSalle D. Leffall told DOTmed News.

In the report, the group acknowledges that advanced imaging has helped relegate most exploratory surgeries to the history books and has led to doctors finding, and therefore treating, cancers much earlier.

But the group worries that this growth in medical radiation exposure is not appreciated in the health community. It points out that the organ dose range for computed tomography (CT), taking into account multiple scans and machine and operator variability, is 5-100 mSv, the equivalent of the doses received by the average Hiroshima bomb drop survivor who stood several thousand yards from ground zero.

And the panel thinks there is a lack of knowledge about medical radiation's risks among most doctors. According to the panel, a recent survey suggested that three-quarters of radiologists and emergency-room physicians significantly underestimated the radiation dose from a CT scan, with nearly nine out of 10 ER doctors not believing that CT scans increased one's lifetime cancer risk.

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