In the face of withering criticism from groups on all sides with a vested interest, the Canadian government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper rushed emergency legislation through Canada's House of Commons to reopen the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited reactor at Chalk River, Ontario.

The reactor is North America's only source of the base isotope for technetium-99 which produces molybdenum-99, the workhorse of modern medical diagnostic systems. As a result of an extended and unanticipated shutdown to repair the 50-year-old reactor, nuclear medical treatments at hospitals around the world were, as of late December, still being delayed or deferred.

In effect, the legislation suspends the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's oversight of the ageing reactor for 120 days, allowing repairs to continue while the reactor comes back online, allowing it to produce the highly prized radioisotopes. Those isotopes, incidentally, are injected into about 200,000 Americans and 50,000 Canadians every month to diagnose such illnesses as heart ailments, cancers, bone diseases and a host of blood related problems. At press time, it was still unclear when the reactor would reopen and begin shipping medical isotopes, though estimates suggested new supplies would be available around the first of the new year.
The immediately compelling fear of the medical community has been that seriously ill individuals were being told they could not have the tests they needed because a hospital's run out of supplies. In essence, foreign oil producers weren't the only ones to have a stranglehold on the US over materials and resources this country can't afford to live without.
"This is a bad news story in every sense of the word," said Dr. Alexander J. B. McEwan, president, Society of Nuclear Medicine. "It means patients are going to suffer. People are going to look at this and say, 'Why are we so reliant on a single supplier?'"

Even Cardinal Health, the US's single largest supplier of radiopharmaceuticals and, unlike most of its competitors, a long time proponent of double sourcing its supplies (besides the Canadian reactor, Cardinal also obtains molybdenum-99 from Europe), admits that all companies in the industry are dealing with the shortages' effects. "We're all working to prioritize," a company spokesperson said.

But the crisis just highlights much larger issues for nuclear medicine in the US, where misguided fears about the effects of radiation already have the industry backpedaling.

More Industry Headlines