What Did You Do with the Technetium-99m I Gave You Yesterday?

[beamjockey]

An alternate title might be

Inject All You Want. We'll Make More!

Roger Z brought in a clipping about account of a technetium-99m shortage.

My first thought on skimming this was "There's always a technetium-99m shortage. There's always going to be a technetium-99m shortage."

Technetium-99m has a six-hour half-life.

Alas, the news proves to be non-trivial. Hospitals obtain fresh technetium-99m from a supply of molybdenum-99, which has a 66-hour half-life, with ^99mTc as a decay product. Make the molybdenum isotope in a reactor, transport it to hospitals, then "milk" fresh technetium from a solution containing ⁹⁹Mo. This works for many days, then eventually fresh ⁹⁹Mo is needed.

If the Chalk River reactor is down for a few days, no problem. If it's down for several weeks, trouble.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Tangential to what you're writing about, but...my first reaction was "but Roger Z is dead, dammit!". Then, seeing the content, I figure you're referring to a friend or co-worker, and not the person of that name I immediately think of (the one I think of being the author of course). No ill-will towards the living Roger Z of course! Or you either, for that matter. Just a weird moment.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Yes, I heard about this shortage on the news yesterday, which mentioned that three other smaller nuclear installations making this stuff were or would also shut down for maintainance at roughly the same time, leaving the only installation still able to generate this a Dutch reactor in Petten. Which was news to me, but apparantly in normal times it supplies roughly 30 percent of world demand, with the Chalk River reactor supplying about the same amount. So you only got half a dozen manufacturers for these essential products.

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

Yup, words like catastrophic are being bandied around among my nuc med colleagues; looks like mid-January before it'll be up again.

Chalk River has, until the last few days, been producing nigh on 70% of some isotopes, since one or more reactors elsewhere in the world were down.

Next year, we are putting in a PET/CT scanner and a cyclotron to 'feed' it - or rather, feed the patients. We'll still be dependant on Chalk River et al for ordinary nuc med however.

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

I got shot up with Tc-99m in a vain attempt to find out why my heart was still beating. I remember having a long discussion with the nurse about how they didn't "milk" it from radioactive cows, but from the Moly.

I had never seen a syringe with a lead cylinder surrounding it before that day. I watched the gammas coming out of my heart real-time. Damn cool.

Tom